For example, I feel that a sharing app that let's people know "Ah. John's not answering the phone because he's in the middle of a meeting with Mr F Barbaz" is the wrong way to deal with others. There's no need for people to have that information, and there's no need for me to explain to people why I am not answering. I am simply not available.
I wrote, somewhat tangentially, about the need for a new 'not available' social norm in a piece about long haul flights: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/archive-of-my-newstilt-stories.h...
To me these sharing status apps are a sign of an unhealthy idea that people are always available unless they come up with some good reason not to be. The only people who might actually need to know where I am because of some emergency are few in number (my parents, my spouse, my boss) and they can always SMS me a '911' text message.
PS None of that should be seen as a criticism of this person's app or work. There may be a large market for this which simply excludes me.
PPS It's worth thinking through what are the 'acceptable' reasons for not answering a call. In a meeting? On the toilet? Thinking? Writing code? Staring out the window letting your mind wander? And who makes that judgement. To me the simplest solution is to not answer when I don't want to and not be accountable to others for why I did not answer.
I've been putting extra effort lately into putting up lots of boundaries. I carry my cell phone a lot less. I'm slower to return calls. My email replies are brief and sporadic. It's really nice.
I see people spending a lot of time alternating between Facebook and email and texting on their phone, and ... I'm not sure if I've gone crazy, or everyone else has.
The idea behind this app, cool as it is technically, makes me a little bit sick to my stomach.
Welcome to Old.
My hypothesis is that apps that aren't about sharing what you're DOING but rather what you'd like to do, especially in the short term, will ultimately be more useful. I don't want people to know what I'm doing or where I am, but I might like them to know where I'd like to be, with them, later tonight.
As John says, no criticism of the app itself, rather a rant about the you-should-be-available-everywhere-and-anytime mentality!
To give them an idea of how long to wait before trying again. It's consideration for the time of others.
"We will start making money in 6 months" is not good enough.
Nothing wrong with being a bit creative, but they didn't nail that experience.
But in all seriousness it doesn't look like an investor's pitch to me. I think its just about getting some buzz and users. Personally I wouldn't use it but I know people who would.
A feature is not an app. An app is not a business. Startups are businesses, and it's only a business if customers give you money.
If you are pitching a startup, always include a plausible hypothesis about how you will make money. It could be wrong, but so could every other thing in your pitch.
- What's the incentive for me to use this? Why not simply switch my phone off? It seems as though the core benefit is to answer the question, "Why isn't X answering their call?", but there's no clear incentive for X to share this. In fact, if X is busy, it's unlikely they will have the time to update their status.
- How do you explain to a non-technical user how this differs from Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare? How do you respond to a user telling you "I don't have time for another social network"?
- Have you thought about how to prevent "feature creep"? I see simplicity as the core selling point of this app, but I can also see strong pressure from investors to build this out until it turns into a generic social network.
Anyway, it looks visually stunning and I'm excited to see where you take it.
Outside of that, here's my dilemma; even if I was crazy social, Facebook/FourSquare/Gowalla know where I am and offer me more incentives to post my locations and activities through them. What does this offer me? The problems you list that motivated you to create this app are easily solved by ignoring your phone or sending texts. If I'm busy, I'm too busy to update an app my friends probably won't even check. If I'm relaxing, I don't want people to know where I am and what I'm doing because I'm trying to relax. Ignoring them, which is the current method for handling these problems, is easier to do than what you are proposing.
I think you need to find a better reason for people to use something like this, which I think would be more relevant to families and possibly remote co-workers, and go from there.
Why not validate it first? I think you should look for investors when you have first experience growing your first user base, see how the adoption amongst users will be etc. This is a difficult model to grow.
Extremely well done!
However, I agree with other posters that I don't see the business model, nor the need for the Android app before gaining traction/validating the business model.
Good luck.
I'm curious if you are using native region monitoring for iOS?
I'm do Product & Business Development for Gimbal (http://www.gimbal.com) - and think I have a solution that you can use to help you on the geo-fencing side.
Feel free to email me and I can give you some use-case examples and intro you to one of my engineers that can help you integrate/test out our SDK.
Nothing wrong with that but I don't see me updating another app while the information is in most cases available somewhere else. For the app to be useful I would need to give it even more information than I do with all other platforms while the benefit is that people aren't annoyed because I don't take their calls.
Why should I use your service if none of my friends are?
however it seems like with geo fencing and a willingness to share your address book with a new service it can do all the work for you, so it might be useful, but profitable? without selling contact info i don't get. ads in the status screen?
