The This For That

One of the best guilty pleasures, not to mention one of the best products we have ever come across, is Angel List. In fact, we can’t decide which part we like more, their unique coverage or the fact that their own iterative innovation is a living playbook for anyone who wants to build and release code online. For those who have yet to get turned on to the crack which is Angel List, it is the marketplace and almost yellowpages for startups / early stage companies and investors. It is so well done and continues to improve that we can’t say enough about it. While ostensibly about the startup market, Angel List also provides a look into the collective attention of today’s entrepreneurs. Their efforts span categories, covering everything from the copy cat (daily deal businesses) to charities. No two businesses seem alike, but you can tease out trends.

Among the most common themes we see is not so much a business theme, e.g. mobile, but a corporate marketing / strategy theme. It seems that every company wants to the be <insert established leader’s name> of <big new vertical>. You’ll see companies who want to be the Google of machine catalogs, the Opentable for the spa industry, the Foursquare for the web, etc. It is Amazon + Couture, or Fandango meets Shopping.com. It almost doesn’t matter so long as the names sound good. We don’t know what the Nike of publishing would be, but that’s what we would call ourselves if given the chance. True, some of the concepts are a stretch, but as much as we might want to give others a hard time for their lack of descriptive originality, they do make it easier to explain the business. One such combination involves becoming the Twitter of something.

We still struggle with Twitter, both as users and from a business perspective. Unlike other hot technology companies that we don’t use often, e.g., Foursquare, there is something naturally appealing about Twitter as a concept. It’s a new inbox and used most effectively not to keep in touch with a group of friends or have discussions with them but to broadcast and consume content. It’s genius lies in its simplicity and openness. It created a new relationship paradigm – the Follow, which acts much like a signup or subscription giving one person permission to contact another. As for its other new paradigms, it set the standard for creating a service meant for others to creative services. They allow and empower other more fanciful applications to leverage Twitter’s data, from inbox / contact enhancer startup Connected to the lovely iPad app Flipboard. Neither of those tries to be a better Twitter, but by leveraging Twitter’s data they can create a unique experience. In the case of Flipboard, it makes for a better tool to consume tweets, but it can never replace Twitter regardless of its popularity.

For all that Twitter can do, there are industries for whom its set up and data won’t help. That doesn’t mean that the user behavior brought about by Twitter can’t be used in those other industries. One of them is local, which is where the “Twitter for local” comes in. We are seeing more and more startups attempt to become even that, though most don’t know it yet. They start out by wanting to be something like Foursquare – a mobile / geo application. One that we know personally, Buddha, leverages the social graph to help its users find physical connections. It’s purposely vague so that if you want to use it to meet romantic interests you can, or if you happen to be sitting in an airport lounge or at a festival you can connect with those who share friends, interests, etc.

Buddha will succeed from a user install basis on how it can become a frequently used tool in our lives. It will make money, though, if it can become the Twitter for local, which is really flipping Groupon on its head. The Twitter for local is allowing users to “follow” businesses in their area or to follow brands they like who have a local presence. If, like Twitter, an application can amass a big enough following like Foursquare has, it can then give permission to these businesses to reach out to them. No personal information is exchanged. The businesses don’t have their phone number, and the friction for no longer accepting push messages is non-existent. It’s what being the Twitter for something is, a less technical sounding RSS.

Creating the channel by which merchants can push messages to their users is something that excites us tremendously. Merchants don’t have time. They are like celebrities. Giving them something super easy. Don’t ask them to learn how to do newsletters. Giving them a way to share and promote. It’s what small businesses and celebrities do for their livelihoods, only with different monetization outcomes. Twitter can’t be the Twitter for local, because it’s in the cloud whereas something like Foursquare is on the grid. The Twitter for local has to be local first then Twitter, not the other way around. It will be a thing of beauty too. Not location based push messages that you didn’t want because you walked by but a desire to be notified of deals. The Twitter for Groupon for Foursquare. Perfect.