This post was written by guest contributor Paul Bragiel, founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform that was DeadPooled last month. Bragiel is also the founder hosted forum solution Lefora. See our coverage of these two companies here, along with our first post on Meetro in August 2005. Also see our post titled What To Do With Failed Startup IP?.
In the spirit of openness, I write this post on what we did wrong at Meetro – a post mortem of sorts. You don’t see this often enough in the startup world even though the majority of startups go belly-up. Hell, there are probably a few today that will go away with a whimper. So much knowledge is lost. If you’ve had similar experiences, I encourage you to share them over at Lefora.
To those of you not familiar with Meetro, we were one of the first location-based social networks. We figured out where you were physically and then we would tell you else was around you in real-time. You would then be able to instant message with them, check out their profiles, and hopefully meet up. Other functionality included telling you about restaurants close by, media created nearby, and various local information that pertained to your location. We also supported all your various instant messaging protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and a slew of other social features.
Even with a robust product we simply couldn’t capture enough market share. So here are the major problems we had that, in the end, we couldn’t overcome. There were, of course, mini fires and random things but every startup goes through those. I have a feeling some of the other location-based startups out there right now are experiencing the same things.
Most importantly, there was a “location problem”. It’s really hard to grow a product that’s 100% focused on where you physically are. Tons of companies have tried this before and most of them have died. We, of course, were cocky and had to give it a try. There was just something so sexy about the idea that you could load up a piece of software and it would tell you about someone nearby who was interesting to you. Someone will crack this and make billions of dollars on it. I can only hope to be involved in some shape or form, since it’s an itch that hasn’t gone away for me.
A perfect example of this difficulty was our community in Chicago. We launched our product and got all of our friends in Chicago on it. We then had the largest papers in the area do nice detailed write-ups on us. Things were going great. We had hundreds of active users and you could feel the buzz around it. We threw a few parties that continued to support the good mood all around. Hell, our CTO Sam even met his current girlfriend at one of them.
The problem we would soon find out was that having hundreds of active users in Chicago didn’t mean that you would have even two active users in Milwaukee, less than a hundred miles away, not to mention any in New York or San Francisco. The software and concept simply didn’t scale beyond its physical borders.
I would also cite a theoretical Idaho example. No matter how slick Meetro was, if you opened it up in the middle of Idaho and no one else was nearby using it, the service simply wasn’t that interesting. We did do a few things to address this, such as including “random” people and the whole Meetro team in the application. I must say, this did create some great friendships and kept some people around, but in the end it just wasn’t enough.
So how do you overcome the location problem? The way I see it, a Meetro-like application will succeed with one of the following strategies.
1. A product with a HUGE audience turns it on. I’m talking about a MySpace, Facebook, etc. Something that has a really rabid audience, where it would be a great feature addition. It still wouldn’t be easy. You would have to do it properly right out of the gate. There are just tons of privacy and personal issues that come into play when you are talking about physical location.
I remember vividly being pissed that MySpace didn’t work with us (read: buy us) after talking with them off and on. I was naive, the more I think about it. It would have unleashed pure anarchy and it wouldn’t have been worth it in the short-term. Plus, at the time they were dealing with their own scaling issues and moving over to .Net. However, I still think it’s something that should be on the roadmap of one of these big players.
2. A company has a really long term vision and builds it out city by city. This is similar to the approach taken by Yelp. They know it’s not easy and I know first hand that they are putting a lot of effort into fostering their communities. It’s an ongoing job. You simply can’t establish a city and then let it fend for itself.
We had this happen to us in Meetro. After we got the Chicago community going, we up and moved our company to Palo Alto. We weren’t there anymore to be the face of the community, organize events, etc. While the service continued and had a core bunch of people using it, by no means was it as rabid as it was at its peak. By the time I realized this, it already was a bit too late and we had shifted our focus to getting a community going in San Francisco.
3. Someone creates a viral product that grows like crazy but location isn’t the core feature. It just happens to be part of the bigger whole and as people use it more and more, they realize that the location piece built into it has become increasingly valuable for them. I don’t know what this product is, otherwise I would be building it right now.
Next, the “download problem”. This one is obvious now but when we started in 2004, Web 2.0 hadn’t quite happened yet and some download apps were still growing (e.g. Skype). Plus we needed a download for the application to work. Having worked with phone carriers for years, I had decided early on that we simply weren’t going to wait for the carriers to get their act together on location. They still haven’t done it properly 4 years later.
So to get around them we decided we would build out our own location technology. We filed patents and everything. Simply put, we were counting on the continued growth of WiFi. When you launched Meetro we would scan for all the WiFi networks out there. We would then crosscheck what was out there with what we had in a huge global database (it had grown to 4+ million hotspots when we stopped). If it was in the database, then we would do some trilateration to figure out where you were. If not, we would ask you to enter your location. We would save this info and use it later to crosscheck and verify it against similar data.
This data grew quite fast. We averaged around 5 wifi routers found per location, and in dense cities like New York, I remember averaging 9.6. I remember being quite excited since a key part of our business plan was to build an alternate GPS of sorts and use Meetro as a vehicle to gather and refine this data. The best part was that the technology was self-healing, so if some router was replaced or moved our system, we would learn about it very fast.
In the end, though, the dropoff that happened once people had to download and install Meetro was HUGE and didn’t help us at all. If I recall, it was something in the 80 to 90% range. It crushed adoption rates.
Lastly, the “realtime problem”. This one is similar to the location problem in that if someone wasn’t online when you were online, they were no good to you. While the realtime chat aspect of the application made for some really serendipitous meetings, it also made it harder for people to gauge the activity of their communities, especially if they logged in at odd hours, people were set as away, etc.
I can still feel the magic of when I was on layover in the Denver Airport, I met one of our users, and we grabbed a beer. This is what I dreamed Meetro would be about all the time, but those moments were too few and far between. We did fix this in the end but it was too little too late. So, to anyone tackling this problem in the future, make sure you have some type of persistence built-in, be it “people here previously” or “most common visitors to the area” etc.
Compound these 3 problems and the writing was on the wall. So how would I do things differently today?
1. I would wait until location is all clean and dandy with the carriers and build on top of that. Loopt has been doing the huge business development cycle and has been waiting it out for the past few years. It seems as though they’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m not really following who else is doing this stuff right now, but I’m sure they’re out there.
2. I would take our technology, create an API, and plug it into existing applications that have already been downloaded and given low-level access to the hardware our technology needed. I’m thinking about something that would run on top of AIM, Skype or Firefox, for example. Act as a friendly parasite on top of these apps that are already well established. Expect some licensing announcements soon concerning our IP on this front.
3. The other option is to build out something that just allows you to “check in” where you are at. Kind of like Twitter meets location (Dodgeball did this). However, this in my mind compromises the ultimate use case of a Meetro-like concept.
We could have gone about trying to fix Meetro but the team was just ready to move on. Raising money on the flat growth we had was nearly impossible. Plus I knew that in order to keep the tight-knit team we had built together, we needed to shift focus for sanity sake. People (myself included) just felt beat up. We knew that fixing these issues would involve a complete rearchitecturing of the code, and people just weren’t excited about the idea enough anymore to do it right.
The problem is this. your site is a “feature” and not a “product”.
this seems like self-involved chatter, not a lessons learned article.
>Having worked with phone carriers for years, I had decided early on that we simply weren’t going to wait for the carriers to get their act together on location. They still haven’t done it properly 4 years later.
>1. I would wait until location is all clean and dandy with the carriers and build on top of that
I was working on http://www.annotatedearth.com/ back in 2002, 3 years before Meetro was around (and before most Location Aware tech was there).
The main issues that kept me from moving forward were 1) lack of technology that people carried around them that had GPS on them and 2) the walled garden that are the cell phone carriers.
#2 was the biggest – Trying to work out deals with cell phone makers and carries that would allow a application to run on their hardware and actually get access to real GPS coords was nearly impossible, at least for a really small shop.
It’s disappointing to see to see that six years later we are still muddling around on this one. The technology has been in place to really allow location-aware apps to take off for some time now. I would imaging the phone carries and hardware vendors would be realizing a lot of money on transaction fees on this stuff, if they’d just open up a bit and let people innovate on their technology.
‘course if I was going to return to try to do something like this now, I would look at the iPhone (when it gets REAL GPS), or the Google Phone (if it ever manages to come out). But that would only be a limited % of users – like the story here says, you also need to be a ubiquitous tech that everyone has with them, to really make Location Aware work, at least for a app like this.
-Greg
-Greg
I find it funny that this start up gets a ten times more coverage in death than it ever did in life
Andrew, if you look at our original post on them back in 2005, they actually got a lot of coverage. weren’t that many startups launching back then.
http://www.tech...profile-meetro/
what happend to the IP ..is it being auctioned, are open sourcing it hopefully
Hi Paul
Having a dream die is never easy so I sympathize and understand why you would want to get some of it off your chest.
In reading though I got the impression that the idea was just something that you and your team and a few more Chicagoans were in love with ….scratch that…excited about, but no indication that any research was done to test wider interest or lasting utility…and the lasting utility has a big question mark! I love a good time ….but at my own choosing.
If there is no utility (at least in the present)…it really doesn’t matter how many things you did or didn’t do right.
Love your courage though in at least talking about it…All the very best in your next gig!
Thanks for the insight, location is a cool thing to have and people will get that ahaa! moment when it’s implemented across all phones for the general public.
I really think the download part is the killer, if you talk to any average joe all they think their phone does is voice, sms and maybe alarm clock/calendar. If you ask them to download and install something to their phone, they’ll give you a blank stare.
For apps on a phone to succeed beyond the tech enthusiast/early adopter crowd, phone companies need to make finding and installing apps a no brainer.
I don’t know how to do that but perhaps a global application browser which lists apps for that phone, then allows you to click the ‘I want that’ button and it’s all done. But then the phone manufacturers/operators would have to include that app browser to begin with…
Is the primary purpose of this article to direct traffic to Paul’s “Lefora” free forum product? I’m referring to the link in the first paragraph: share your experiences “over at Lefora”. If so, well done Paul, very clever way to get cheap adverstising.
Thanks Paul!
I love failure stories, easier for me to learn from.
Michael,
You should host stories like this more often (if available).
Fascinating story. Thanks for sharing.
One useful lesson seems to be that there are plenty of valuable ideas for which the existing forms of financing are not well-suited. Too bad there isn’t a kind of venture capital fund that specializes in financing R&D to keep your team together for another few years, working on licensing and consulting with other firms that might have a better product development infrastructure already in place.
A nice insight into the location problem! This problem is just not meant for little leaguers. Even Google is having trouble.
cheap advertorial, cheap article. Mike, don’t let your friends spam this very unique and succesful blog. Looks so disgusting.
Meetro started up just the same time Plazes did, and Meetro didn’t have a Mac version, so ended I up on Plazes for a while.
http://vielmett.../08/plazes.html
Fundamentally, though, location-based services are cool only in the early adoption phase, and as soon as you get a single person in your friend list who creeps you out by knowing a little bit too much about where you are, it’s really easy to come up with reasons to back out. Not surprised it didn’t work out.
Great article – helps people understand and avoid the pitfalls. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/Sv03Ta4241_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Great article – helps people understand and avoid the pitfalls. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/I5ZfqG5372″}}}
Thanks for sharing. The mayority of the start-ups need focus, hard work and patience. And network. I think that many early products need partnerships like the ones you indicated to get critical mass, unfortunately for us outside Silicon Valley, it is hard to get them. A product half as good as yours, with the right friends, can get in the right places faster.
If someone the “product” that you were after and are about to launch it in another country (Assume your in America – Chicago reference) would you / could you resurect it and join forces? And if so how would one get hold of you? – Note there is no location away suff in my country but it’s the one thing that many people have asked me to add (those who have seen the pre-launch product).
I think this is an interesting insight into location based apps or sites. But I still think one could have seen these problems coming but its good somebody had the guts to give it a try.
Who wants to bet on what % of the first 1000 third-party apps out for the iPhone are location-based social networking apps? Or, on how long until one of them “wins”?
Well, good on you man. I mean, most do not even take the gumption to start a business. I dont think you failed, really no one does. You will take these experiences and you will use them in your next venture.
Most of them at the MIT Android competition where location based products. That will be a key feature in many mobile apps. But I agree with a previous comment, it is a feature, not a product.
And when I think I built a location based social network back at the begginging of 2006 but never launched more than a prototype: http://www.mirc...agoia.com/local
I wonder now if I would have met the same difficulties as Paul met….or Backfence met.
Great (echo)post(/echo) Paul.
/me Echo
Great post! Thanks for sharing. I found it very educational.
I hope you have success with scratching the “itch” of this idea in the future because I really want to use it!
Thanks Paul. But…this article doesn’t say why you failed: lack of market research, poor management practices, idea before technology???
Man, good post and all my respect to you, even though your startup is now defunct. You are/were the man in the arena and know infinitely more than I do about all this stuff.
Common interests open many doors to people’s hearts and minds, therefore they have to go first.
However, from my extensive research of all this Web 2.0 stuff I learned one most important thing: it is not the location – it is people’s interests that have to be placed above all else. Location goes next.
Let me give an example: If I like books, I will try to find people who have the same interests near the place I live. First, I have to like books. Second – I look for nearby people who like them too. I just don’t see it working the other way around: I see who lives nearby and then try to find the ones who like books. Those people are a bunch of strangers to me and I don’t really give a damn about them. Imagine standing in a crowd on the street and trying to find out who likes books. It would be a silly task…
Common interests bring people together much more quickly than common location: do you know your neighbors’ names?
Ning is already doing what I am writing here: they allow users to create communities based on common interests. Then, those people can arrange meetings in certain locations close to where they live (not sure if they actually meet with each other, but they certainly can arrange this through their communities on Ning). That’s the right approach.
Again, even if I think that your approach was not right – I respect your try and efforts and appreciate immensely your sharing of this info with all of us.
Cheers!
Paul, great debrief. You guys gave it a good run and obviously learned a lot. I’m looking forward to seeing Lefora rise from the ashes of Meetro.
(and why are there so many trolls on here?)
WoW. One business fails and he already has another up. So when one flat-lines another one pops up, I assume is the moral of this article. I guess if you keep throwing darts eventually one will hit the bullseye…
Good summary of lessons learned. The download problem was indeed major. It amazes me how many mobile companies are still taking that route (and getting funded, mind you) today.
I stand behind what I said back in Jan 06(http://mobilebuzz.blogspot.com/2006/01/meet-meetro.html). Meetro had so much potential because it no only combined location with social networking, but it also bypassed the carriers.
Have you also considered that you might have missed out on targetting the female audience (yelp does it well through their guerilla marketing)? I vividly recall that the ratio on Meetro was always severly sqeued towards the male side. Let’s not forget the important role that females play in social media (http://summatio...af-study-o.html).
Paul, thank you for the insightful comments.
Michael, I second that more stories from failed startups would be great.
Great post, thanks for sharing. Best wishes for your new startup.
#25, I think u got to the core of the problem.
Paul,
Thanks for the debrief and the honesty. I wish you well in your future endeavors and you never know you may find yourself doing something very similar to Meetro in a few years time once things have evolved in the location based services space.
Good luck and I know we will be seeing more of you in the future.
Cheers – Eric
P.S. Mike I once read that one of your passions is reporting on Startups – the courage, the fight, the risk taking – I applaud you for letting Paul share his insights. This is what makes Techcrunch great.
Thank you very much for this article. Not easy to write I’m sure, but it’s a great insight, thank you.
Thanks for sharing and good luck next time!
The problem is that this isn’t a good idea along w/ 99% of “Web 2.0″ applications. So much energy has been spent grasping at the big payday w/o concern to actually solving a real problem.
Every startup should address an real & acute problem for their target customer base. If is doesn’t, don’t waste your time and talent “solving a non-problem”.
I was probably what you would call an early Chicago adopter of Meetro, and I thought it was a great idea, and still do. With each succeeding version of the software, however, the interface seemed to get weirder and weirder until I couldn’t figure it out anymore. I was sort of an occasional user looking now and again for simpatico neighbors, and I thought a simple interface would have been the best (for me). I think the concept was a winner if capital had been available to keep it going until it took off, and of course if revenue were eventually forthcoming.
I personally think it’s a great write-up and totally sympathize with the writer and his ‘drama’ (for lack of a better word.)
If a VC/angel wasn’t involved, why would you have shut it down? Make money writing software for others and have no VC/angel money, so you would have no pressure to shut it down for a friggin tax write off.
I totally object to the notion that just because it didn’t work in whatever limited time you gave it that it couldn’t have worked if you had stuck to it and kept it alive.
I checked Meetro twice — right, when they launched and again in a year. There were zero improvements in that year! Still their blog was filled with a crap like “look at our bran new and cool office”. I posted a comment asking what’s up and reporting some bugs. The comment was quickly deleted and nobody ever got back to me. That day I knew they were dead.
Great to see your write-up, more founders should do this too. We learnt much of this the hard way at around the same kind of time. It does highlight the danger of failure as a result of being a little early- in a few years time many of the barriers you faced _should_ be much more easily overcome.
@2 (Drew) said this seems like self-involved chatter, not a lessons learned article.
Jeez Drew, if you don’t see any lessons to be learned from this good write-up, then you are “thick as a brick”.
It is said that we learn more from failures than from success (which is far too often really luck and being in the right place at the right time). I would like to see more post-mortem’s and analysis.
Paul, thanks for sharing your story. It sounds like the concept is something worth hanging in there for, especially when you described your airport meet-up. You seem to have nailed the reasons why meetro didn’t succeed in this iteration but I’m sure you’ll crack it next time around. good luck, and keep the faith (thanks señor Jovi)
Thats why every start up should be boot strapped,you keep it tight work hard and even change your strategy if it’s not working but meetro failed in the latter and ultimately ended up in the deadpool.
Thanks for sharing – it’s rare to see some CEO talking about his “failure”. Don’t worry, it’s not a failure once you learn from your errors. You just have discovered 10 ways of how NOT to do it. That’s very valuable.
Good luck with Lefora!
Hey Paul, thanks for the analysis. Meetro was on my radar for a while ; sad to see it go away, but good that you took the time to reflect on it. All the best with Lefora.
TechCrunch should have more postmortem analysis like this, there’s often more to be learned than from instant successes.
Location awareness is definitely a “sexy” problem to solve.. but on the other hand, craigslist gets better results by simply asking the user where they live! What am I missing here?
Great story, thanks for sharing. I would replace “failure” with “experience” though, as a lot of successful entrepreneurs started out with going bust at some time in their history. Good luck!
50% conversion to download can be had, tho it’s not easy.
Check out companies like Future Now Inc. and read up on UX design.
Great article – fantastic vision – best of luck to the vertical!
Did it occur to you at any time that the general concept might be flawed in that people don’t want to get too close? It is a different thing to talk to strangers online and talk to a stranger who knows you’re a block away and can propose a meeting you don’t really want.
There is a reason SMS messaging got so popular and video calling neved did: SMS closes two communication channels – sound and vision – and leaves the narrow and easily controlled channel of short text only. It limits the possibility of your body language telling what you don’t want to tell. It helps you lie, also about your location.
please make sure that Michael Arrington reads this article really closely. If he keeps up with his credibility issues he’ll have serious business problems, too.
I agree a lot of social start-ups go through the same issues.
>Lastly, the “realtime problem”. This one is similar to the location problem in that if someone wasn’t online when you were online, they were no good to you.
We had a similar experience with http://www.fastflirting.com and solved it by allowing messages for offline users. On mobile-only FF we have only real time chat but with 100x more users so offline communication isn’t critical. Web you need it.