A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Apr 25, 2016

Are There Just Too Many Apps For That?

The strategic question for tech entrepreneurs is how many more apps millennials and those even younger need - or want. JL

Vindu Goel reports in the New York Times:

As thousands of app developers have discovered, attention spans are short, especially among the college and high school students that Down to Lunch is targeting. Dozens of competitors are vying to help people organize spontaneous gatherings, including Hangster, Shortnotice, Down to Hang and a Google app called Who’s Down. And a lot of things can go wrong on the road to becoming the next Snapchat.
Nikil Viswanathan and Joseph Lau have built the hottest new social app in America. Now the young men have to keep it from getting crushed by an anonymous slander campaign, overwhelmed servers and their urge to personally respond to thousands of messages from users.
The app, called Down to Lunch, is shockingly old-fashioned: It’s all about meeting up with your friends in person. You send a message to some or all of your buddies saying that you have free time and are looking for company for a meal, a gym workout, even a church service. Whoever is interested responds and you arrange to meet.
“We’re trying to make it feel like you live with your friends again in your freshman dorm,” said Mr. Viswanathan, a Texas native who graduated from Stanford University in 2012 with a master’s in computer science.
The concept is so simple that the first version was built in a day last spring. By last week, Down to Lunch, also known as DTL, was the No. 1 free social networking app for the iPhone and the No. 2 free iPhone app over all. (It doesn’t rank quite as high on Android.)
But keeping a prime position on crowded smartphone screens isn’t easy. Just ask Foursquare, which debuted with a splash in 2009 but has drifted into near irrelevance, or Yo, an app that lets you send the word “yo” to your friends, which momentarily topped the charts in 2014.
Mr. Viswanathan, a mile-a-minute talker, and Mr. Lau, who is more laid-back, meet one fundamental requirement for success: a stubborn belief that they have a great idea. Mr. Viswanathan worked on five previous services that tried to connect people, three of them with Mr. Lau, but Down to Lunch was the first to catch on.
The San Francisco start-up has needed little capital so far, and the founders have turned away dozens of potential investors. However, the men, both Stanford alumni, have not been shy about seeking advice from their array of Silicon Valley connections, including senior tech executives, venture capitalists and other company founders.
As thousands of app developers have discovered, attention spans are short, especially among the college and high school students that Down to Lunch is targeting. Dozens of competitors are vying to help people organize spontaneous gatherings, including Hangster, Shortnotice, Down to Hang and a Google app called Who’s Down.
And a lot of things can go wrong on the road to becoming the next Snapchat.
Down to Lunch’s servers went down last week after hitting limits imposed by their cloud computing provider, forcing the start-up to devise a work-around. A human error derailed sign-ups for six hours on Monday.
In addition to typical start-up problems — lack of sleep, inadequate staffing, technical malfunctions — Mr. Viswanathan and Mr. Lau have also been battling an anonymous social media campaign claiming that Down to Lunch is used for sex trafficking.
Photo
High school and college students are the target audience for Down To Lunch. When there are new versions of the app to test, the app’s team goes to the University of California, Berkeley to get feedback. Credit Laura Morton for The New York Times
The assertions, some describing encounters with suspicious strangers, are dubious. Down to Lunch is designed to allow communications only between people who know each other and have each other’s phone number.
Kirsta Melton, who heads the human trafficking division of the Texas attorney general’s office, said that she looked into the app and found no evidence supporting the allegations.
“Unless you have random strangers in your address book or someone stole your phone, it’s unlikely that this app could be used for human trafficking,” she said.
It’s not clear who is behind the smear campaign, although Mr. Viswanathan and Mr. Lau believe it might be a competitor. They traced the accusations back to several Twitter accounts. Twitter temporarily suspended one account and appears to have blocked offending tweets from others. Apple and Google have also removed app-store reviews that mention the trafficking allegations.
But that has not stopped worried users from contacting Mr. Viswanathan or Mr. Lau or simply deleting the app. Mr. Viswanathan said one school administrator even called him about it.
Despite the damage the trafficking accusations have caused, there is no question that Down to Lunch has struck a chord with young people. After the app appeared on the University of Notre Dame’s campus, for example, 15 percent of the student body.
downloaded it within 12 hours, Mr. Viswanathan said.
Aakash Malhotra, a freshman at the University of Georgia who downloaded the app last September, said it helped him build friendships on campus. “We have enough apps on our phone that give us information or entertain us,” he said. “We’d rather have an app to help us connect in person.”
Until February, Mr. Viswanathan and Mr. Lau were the only employees. The six-person company still operates from the loft-style apartment that the founders share in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.
Whiteboards cover one wall, laying out the top tasks for the day and week. Mash notes from fans are posted as inspiration. Leaky takeout containers have colonized the kitchen, and Mr. Lau often stashes McDonald’s breakfast burritos in the refrigerator to fuel marathon coding sessions.
Mr. Viswanathan, 28, interned at Microsoft, Google and Facebook, where he sat right outside the glass-walled office of Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive, and occasionally played chess with him.
Photo
Mr. Viswanathan and Mr. Lau introducing themselves to Zharia Harper, second from left, and Azhon Brown at the University of California, Berkeley last month. Eric Conner accompanied them to seek feedback from people on campus. Credit Laura Morton for The New York Times
Mr. Lau, 26, was an engineering intern at LinkedIn. When the job wound down, LinkedIn’s chairman and co-founder, Reid Hoffman, personally implored him to stay. Mr. Lau declined and later went to Pinterest.
While the pair has not been shy about tapping their networks for help, they have eschewed most of the usual marketing tactics for a start-up.
They have avoided publicity, refusing most interview requests. When Product Hunt, a service that highlights new apps, opened a discussion about Down to Lunch two months ago, Mr. Viswanathan quickly posted a note saying, “Haha what how is this on product hunt — can we take this down?”
And in an industry where an investment from a top venture capitalist confers immediate credibility, “they’ve been pushing everyonne
away, even the who’s who of investing,” said Cameron Teitelman, the chief executive of StartX, a nonprofit for Stanford entrepreneurs that has helped the company.
Mr. Lau explained, “If we take time out to raise money, that’s time we’re not working on the product. That’s time that users can’t talk to us. That’s time that we’re not keeping servers up.”
The founders and their small team have instead focused on improving the app. When they have a new version to test, they drive across the Bay Bridge to the University of California, Berkeley, to get feedback from students.
They try to respond personally to the thousands of messages they get from users every week. At one point, Mr. Viswanathan was getting so many texts that his iPhone’s messaging app froze. The problem stumped even Apple’s V.I.P. support team, which got involved after Mr. Viswanathan emailed Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, for help.
The founders are also wrestling with a question faced by developers everywhere: How hard do you push your users to recruit friends to download your app?
Last week, they added a button that allowed people to invite all of their contacts with one click. But many people consider such requests to be spam, and Twitter was already filled with complaints from people who received unwanted Down to Lunch invitations.
After a couple of days, the pair decided to disable the mass-invitation feature.
Although their lives are stressful, the founders say they are having a blast.
“We know we can build something that improves the lives for every single person on the planet,” Mr. Viswanathan said. “It sounds kind of crazy, but we’re going to do it.”

0 comments:

Post a Comment