Today our portfolio company Foursquare is launching the all new Foursquare. You can download it here.
There’s a really interesting lesson for entrepreneurs and developers in the Foursquare story. The initial product was very innovative and it brought to market the notion of checkins, being able to see where your friends were, recommendations of places by your friends instead of strangers, and a social feed based on location.
Since Foursquare launched, over 50 million people worldwide have checked into a place on Foursquare, creating over 6 billion checkins, and millions of new checkins are created every day. And yet for many, the initial Foursquare was a challenging product. Last year, the Foursquare team took a step back and analyzed why such a groundbreaking product was so challenging for so many.
This analysis told them a few important things:
1) Foursquare had to support two separate privacy models. While you probably want every Foursquare user to see your tips and recommendations, you definitely don’t want them to all know where you are. So that required two privacy models. Most users find two privacy models in one app to be quite confusing.
2) A hard core of Foursquare users love to checkin. I am one of them. I want to database my life, the places I go, and what I see and do there. I have checked in a total of 6,342 times since I started using Foursquare.
3) Most Fourquare users don’t want to checkin. Like Twitter, where many users don’t tweet (or don’t tweet often), many Foursquare users don’t checkin. They use the app to find a place to go based on where they are and what they like to do.
So those key learnings and many more told the Foursquare team that they had two primary use cases and they needed two apps to satisfy them. Foursquare for everyone. And Swarm for those users who like to checkin. The all new Foursquare has the Twitter privacy model (default public). And the Swarm app has the Facebook privacy model (default private).
Foursquare and Swarm are an “app constellation.” They work tightly with each other if you have both of them. If you only have Foursquare, then it’s a different and lighter experience.
If you are like most people and don’t want to checkin but do want to know where to go and what to do when you are somewhere new and different or just looking for some inspiration, download the new Foursquare. It’s powered by those 6bn and growing checkins. It has incredible data based on “what they do instead of what they say” and the recommendations are great. I’ve been using the new Foursquare in tandem with Swarm for the past month and I love the combo and what each brings to my life.
