SPUN: The Tale of a Successful Brooklyn App
Thanksgiving, 2011: Here’s the secret to never failing: Like Nate Dogg, you must always be a hustler. When do you stop hustling? When someone kills you. Until then, you haven’t failed. Even if you run out of money. Even if you change your thing so much, you have to give it a new name. The difference between a setback and a failure is you quitting, and nothing else. Like Sam Beckett says: “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”
December 2011: It’s considered impossible to raise money over the holidays, and impossible to raise money in fewer than six weeks. Despite the odds, Scott and Andy go on a whirlwind fundraising tour and secure $1.2M from various investors in two weeks. It’s a Christmas (and Hanukkah) miracle.
January 2012: Work on Broadcastr 3.0 begins. The app will support video, audio, text and slideshows associated with locations—basically, blogging to places. The plan is to launch it in June 2012.
March 2012: Andy and Scott grapple with Broadcastr’s limitations: There isn’t enough good user-generated content published near most of the app’s users for them to use it often. Also, using an app to discover and contribute anecdotes about the world around you is a new behavior—and new behaviors are impossible to instill without reliable rewards.
April 2012: Despite their misgivings, they demo Broadcastr 3.0 to a major media partner, who is impressed and introduces Andy and Scott to a contact at Apple. They fly to Cupertino to meet with him. At 1 Infinite Loop, the Apple rep says the app’s concept of contextual content could be “disruptive,” but the design needs to better reflect the innovative nature of what it does. It needs to delight the user.
May 2012: In search of answers, Scott flies to California to study with B.J. Fogg, mentor to the founders of Instagram, LinkedIn and Pulse. B.J. says: Find something people are already motivated to do, and make it a little bit easier for them to do it. Andy and Scott reassess. Studies show that 66 percent of people access local content every day. There are hundreds of online sources that already write about what’s going on in any given city, but discovering that content needs to be easier.