A few months ago, we introduced our first app, Whim. Aside from an initial influx of ~420 users, likely attributed to the (awesome) press Whim received on TNW, growth and usage has been somewhat stagnant. Long story short, we've decided to shut down the Whim servers and focus on some new projects. I'd like to share some hard-earned personal insights with other entrepeneurs who may be considering launching their first app.

Choosing a Name

As trivial as it seems, chosing a name is unquestionably one of the most difficult tasks we faced in the development of our product, and one that helped put a nail in the Whim coffin. After changing names 3 times or so before launching with "Whim", we discovered (through a nice C&D) that Whim had actually been trademarked since the last time we checked. I won't go into the legalities, but it made strategic and legal sense to stop using "Whim", this may not be true in all cases, based on the strength of the trademark. Heres some tips on chosing a name:

1) Is it trademarked? While checking out name ideas, make sure to do a trademark search, even after deciding and some time has passed. In addition, make sure to trademark your name as soon as possible if it isn't already trademarked.

2) Is it available in the App Store? This seems obvious, but make sure to search the app store for apps using the name already. In our case, Whim was somehow taken already when we went to submit, although it wasn't published in the app store. You can probably submit early and just not publish your app to reserve your name.

3) What about a domain? My opinion is that domains for mobile apps are much less important than domains for web apps, unless there's a major web component to the mobile app. If a top-level domain is already taken, don't let that stop you. Some variation of get_____.com or _____app.com works just fine.

4) Techniques/Tools: Name generation is a funny thing. I've tried quite a few techniques to elicit names ideas. First, make sure you have a really good idea about the "feel" of your brand. Should it feel accessible? If it was a gender, which would it be? If it was an animal, what would it be? This excersise helped a lot in coming up with our name. Next, determine some of the overlying themes of your app (ex. Meetups, Spontinaety, Proximity, Communication) and write as many related words you can think of for each category. I use rhymezone's related words feature to help find related words, it works pretty well even with it's primative design. All of this helps, but sometimes the best names just come to you in the shower or while doing dishes.

The Launch

After months of beta testing Whim with < 100 friends using ad-hoc builds, we were ready to go.

I wish we submitted to the App Store, much much earlier. iOS beta testing with ad-hoc builds is not optimal, yes, even with TestFlight, it's a shitty process. There's a few tricks you can employ to limit access after the app is approved. One clever trick I've seen is charging a super high price for the app and giving out access codes. Another thing you can do is limit access after the app is approved using some web service flag or whatever. I'm pretty sure Apple does not smile upon this, but it'll work. Our friends at Yobongo limited access by geographic region for quite some time.

If you're building a social app, consider launching in private beta. This changes the motivation from getting traction as quickly as possible to building the most engaging, useful app possible.

Sharing As a Focal Point

One of Whim's greatest fatal flaws was it's focus on sharing plans. Sure, it's easy to just say what you'd like to do and publish to your social networks, but incentivising people to do that is difficult. Sharing/creating a Whim was what drove almost the entire ecosystem. Mark Hendrickson from Plancast provides some great insights about the difficulty surrounding social event sharing in his post on Techcrunch The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast. 

Pay Attention to What Works

Just before we launched, we threw in a wildcard feature: notifications when friends open the app "nearby". Admittedly, our definition of nearby was too broad (< 4 miles, changed to < 2 miles). A few people found this annoying because in a dense city like SF, 2 miles isn't really nearby. However, this was a passive, low-friction way of communicating to friends around me that I'm looking for something to do, since I opened up this meetup app. We saw this notification actually drive friends to open the app, which then drove their friends to open the app, etc. Given that you can't really action on a nearby notification, they didn't really lead to engagement and this activity tapered off a bit. This one small, last minute wildcard feature actually lead to the project(s) we're focusing on today.

Know What You're Good At

Throughout my professional career, I've been focused on the engineering side of things, but I've always maintained a respect and appreciation for design. My co-founder and I are both engineers, but I decided to play the designer role for this app as well. I don't regret doing this because it helped me evolve as a designer, but I do think it held up development quite a bit while I was getting over the n00b designer curve. Luckily, I have some great designer friends who'd help with feedback and direction, but it was time consuming and difficult to do along with iOS development.

For our next app, I enlisted a good friend of mine, Sean Nelson to help with the overall look-and-feel of the app and help with various UI elements. Doing so reduced the time to build our next product significantly. Given the time constraint we had < 2 months, by SXSW, this was a wise decision.

I do advocate cross-functionality, if you're up for the challenge, be a designer and a developer, but be realistic about time and resources.

Why Are We Doing This?

When you sacrifice an income, sleep on your co-founder's couch, face enormous uncertanty and ooze blood sweat and tears for your product, you have to ask: why are we doing this? Personally, I live to build things that better the world around us. I've worked full-time at agencies where a developer is a resource and not a person, and I've worked at awesome startups, namely Foodspotting, where I adored my coworkers and the product. Even in the best of times, I was working on side projects (banned by said agency at the time btw) and itching to work on my own interesting projects full-time. It was just a matter of time before I made the jump, and beleive me, it felt like a jump.

Emmanuel and I are extremely passionate about using technology to improve the way people communicate and coordinate. While many ask "Do we really need another social app"? We ask, why isn't this better? Where can we go with this in the near future given the dramatic improvements in mobile technology and distribution? We see opportunity in augmenting the most fundamental human desire to connect.

We're incredibly fortunate to be able to work full-time on the products we're passionate about in this time, and in this place.

What's Next?

Almost immediately after launching Whim, we began working on what we thought of as Whim2, a highly evolved version of whim that addresses the fundamental issues I described above. It won't be called Whim2, and I can't say much about it just yet, but it has been submitted to the app store and should be available pre-SXSW. I hope you'll join us on this ride, stay tuned for upcoming announcements!

Seven months ago, I was lucky enough to join Foodspotting as their first engineering hire. During that time, I've eaten some crazy good food, integrated foursquare photos, implemented instagram crossposting (among many other things), and have seriously had a blast. Foodspotting is a wonderful product, but the "special sauce" truly is in the people behind the product, whom I'll miss greatly.

Today is my last day at Foodspotting. I'm leaving to co-found a startup with a good friend of mine, Emmanuel Pozo (Zynga). It's not easy to leave such a great job and group of people and stare risk and uncertanty in the face. That said, it's my dream to found a startup. I'm passionate about what we're building, and I've got a great co-founder, which is arguably the most difficult part.

So what are we building? I mentioned five startup ideas in my previous post. One idea in particular received a great deal of enthusiasm: Spontaneous Event Organization. This idea is one that has stuck with me, as I repeatedly saw the need for it in my own life.

To recap:

Spontaneous event organization - It's still hard to organize small group events that are happening soon, or now. Even to know simply who's up for doing what you've got in mind within a matter of minutes would certainly make organizing events on the fly much easier.

Emmanuel and I have been working on a solution to this problem on nights and weekends and we're already seeing what we've been building become an essential part of our social lives. I cannot wait to see what we're able to accomplish with our full attention.

If you're interested in working with us in some way, or helping us test the product when that time comes, email me at ben.bloch@me.com.

P.S. If you're passionate about food, the web, and/or mobile, you should work for foodspotting!

The idea is to improve beta testing activities for startups. Because I like to focus on problems, I've separated the post into sections based on the problems I'm familiar with in relation to beta testing. These could all be individual products, all one product, whatever.

Problem - hard to find *great* beta testers.

The following tweet from Rick Olson stuck with me:

I envision a community of people who are enthusiastic about beta testing (I think they exist). Members of this community could build reputation by beta testing apps and receiving feedback from the product owners. Members could be matched or recommended based on demographic information, interests, skills etc.

Problem - reinventing the wheel

When a web application enters private beta, you'll need to collect invite requests, survey responses, build an invite system for those users to invite other people, have a way to invite those initial users, manage that list of users etc. This stuff is somewhat trivial for an experienced web developer, but it takes valuable time away from building the product.

I see this as a centralized cloud service with embeddable UI. Time is the greatest resource for a developer, people will pay for things that save them time, I would.

Your thoughts?

I'd love to hear what you think about this idea. My intent is to start a conversation and hopefully spark some ideas for you.

Somebody already did this!

Sweet! Let me know in the comments and I'll add the links up here.

• Paul Rosania suggests http://www.utest.com/

Startup ideas are essentially worthless. Paul Graham sums it up best in his essay Ideas for Startups.

"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."

Because I believe this is true, and for many other reasons explained below, I'd like to give you some of my ideas, free for the taking, starting with this one.

Why would you do this?

You can't solve all of the problems
If you're anything like me, you have more ideas than you have time and caffeine. Work on the thing that you're most passionate and excited about, someone else out there might be really enthusiastic about building something related to your idea.

The idea solves a problem for you anyways
By focusing on ideas that solve actual problems you face, you still win if somebody builds it.

Early feedback
When I have an idea, I add it to a huge idea list, then tell as many people about it that'll be willing to listen and provide feedback. Even better if those people are potential customers. This acts as a quick sanity filter for ideas.

Finding co-founders
Talking about your ideas is the first step toward finding people who have complimentary skills, who are also excited about your ideas.

Improve your pitching skills
Telling your ideas to anyone who will listen gives you a chance to practice your pitching skills. Even if you never act on any of the ideas, you'll get better at expressing ideas. This is a very important skill for entrepreneurs.

Ideas are not unique
Speaking from my own experience, it's highly likely that somebody is working on your idea right now, or the product already exists in some form. 

Sharing ideas publicly isn't unique either. Damon Clinkscales has been sharing his ideas on his blog, which I encourage you to check out.

Not everyone will feel comfortable about sharing ideas publicly, and there may be good reasons for that. I highly recommend at least sharing them privately the with people you trust aka. the FriendDA. I'm lucky to have some very smart friends to bounce ideas off of. If you've got an idea you'd like some quick feedback on, the best way to reach me is here in the comments or via twitter: @benbinary.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be starting 2010 in San Francisco. This is something that’s been on my map for some time now. Fortunately, I get to make the move with Scrapblog. 

Having lived in Florida for all of my 26 years, a geographic change is more than welcome.  Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to make lifelong friends and work with some very talented people. I’ll miss Refresh Miami and all of the people I met through the meetup. I feel confident that the iPhone meetup I founded is in good hands with Davide Di Cillo. My family lives in South Florida, so I’ll be back from time to time to visit.

The search for an apartment in San Francisco is proving difficult. It seems that most landlords are not pet friendly. I’ve done a fair amount of research on neighborhoods, but I can’t really draw any conclusions without spending some time in each of them. If you live in San Francisco, neighborhood recommendations are very welcome. I’d like to live in an area and a building that feels unique to the city. Think victorians and steep hills. I’d also like to be able to walk to good cafe’s and restaurants. The Mission seems attractive to me because I like burritos and good coffee, but I’m not sure if I want to live there yet. After enduring the oppressive heat and humidity of South Florida, a cool (micro)climate would be nice as well.

If you’ve got any advice for moving to San Francisco, or can recommend a rental agent, please do. If you’re in the market for a road bike or mountain bike and live in Miami, let me know.

Let’s face it, direct messages are the bane of twitter, often amounting to spam, phishing attacks and relentless game invites. Direct messages aren’t inherently bad, even when sent by a third party (expectedly). 

One of the issues with third party apps that send direct messages is that they rarely provide the user with granular control of who to send those messages to. If we empower the user to select the recipients of a DM, and understand what they’re sending up front, I’m willing to bet that the result would be more messages sent over time (good for the third party) and less pissed off followers (good for the sender).

In facebook, we have a friend selector control.

Here, we have a high level of granular control. A user can search by name, list, and network.

Why not do the same with twitter? Maybe something like this...

Similar to the facebook friend selector, such an interface could provide a user with the ability to search for friends to select, filter them by lists, and provide granular control of who will receive the message or invitation.

We can’t assume that twitter will take control of their app ecosystem and put tight policies in place, as facebook has. We can’t assume that twitter will provide us with friend selector controls like the one above. But hey, they’ve got a great API, why not build such a control/service? Well, there are limitations. The main issue is that it takes a lot of time to calculate bi-directional relationships in twitter. These are the users you’re able to direct message. I wrote a little ruby script to do just that as a proof of concept, I may put it on github in the near future. For my account, it takes a little under a minute to page through all of my friends and followers and calculate the intersection of those lists. Most users would drop off before the script completes. If twitter provided a way to request a list of user statuses for which a bi-directional relationship exists, this wouldn’t be an issue. Note: I’m using the status methods for friends and followers, which provide a good amount of metadata about the user, not just the user id.

If you’re providing such an interface in a third party app today, I recommend displaying the entire list of friends (paginated). Obviously, all of the messages won’t succeed, but you could provide feedback to the user about which ones did/didn’t and why. You could even deduce the bi-drectional relationships by looking at which messages succeeded.  

Finally, what if the sender isn’t operating in the recipient’s best interest, intentionally or unintentionally? I propose that such a service would allow recipients to unsubscribe to messages from any given application or sender. It’d be better if twitter facilitated this, but again, we can’t assume that they will.

If you know of any applications that do this well, please let me know in the comments.

(originally posted June 12, 2009 on benbinary.com)

Until lately, I’ve been able to keep my twitter friend activity stream fairly spam-free. It’s easy to spot a twitter spammer. They either have a username following a pattern like femailName1234, are following a lot of people with few follow-backs, have little to no tweets, or tweet nothing but links.

Then spymaster happened. The mafia-wars clone for twitter which polluted activity streams everywhere and bombarded users with direct message invites. This upset a lot of people. Forgetting direct messages for a moment, one might argue that voluntarily updating status as it relates to a social game is a legitimate use-case. If I’m an active spymaster user, for example, maybe I want to see what my friends are doing in this game. Others might find this to be intrusive and spammy activity, depending on the frequency and density in their friend stream.  The point is, the spammyness of these types of social game activity updates are completely subjective. Some may think it’s fine, some may think it’s completely spammy.

Following spymaster, the next most pervasive friend-spamming incident relates to the squarespace marketing campaign. The basic idea is, tweet about this product, potentially get a free iPhone. This campaign prays on people’s desire for free things, especially when it comes to arguably the most desirable consumer good on the market. If a few friends catch on and throw a few tweets out there, it’s forgivable and probably not much of a problem. When half of your friend stream consists of these tweets, daily, it becomes a problem. We all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. When you advertise a product in a tweet, you are potentially losing credibility and followers. I’ve had to unfollow a good number of people due to their obnoxious requests for a free iPhone. Pimping a product in your tweet with the sole intention of reaping some reward is just as bad as selling advertising in your tweet. There’s an app for that, but that’s another post altogether.

So how do we deal with an influx of undesired activity? Right now you’re options are unfollow, get better friends, or do do nothing. Neither of these options are good enough. Hopefully this post convinces them to stop, but I’m not counting on that. I have it on good authority that twitter does not plan on doing much to address this problem, as it’s an entirely human, subjective issue. The only clear solution is better filtering. Twitter clients that allow us to easily filter out spymaster tweets or tweets mentioning squarespace, for example. As this list of things I might want to filter out grows, this will get a bit more complex. Additionally, twitter users tend to use several different clients, and change clients fairly often. The portability of filtering preferences would need to be addressed. Another approach might be to have a server-side proxy for filtering tweets based on preferences I set in a centralized location. Your favorite twitter client could potentially integrate this proxy. I’m not sure what the answer will be, but I hope to see a solution soon.

On to direct messages. When spymaster launched, I received numerous invitations via direct message to play spymaster. This is incredibly annoying and intrusive, but luckily spymaster acted quickly to provide a solution by allowing people to opt out of invites. This is similar to blocking app requests in facebook but relies on third parties to implement the opt-out. Now, if someone invites me to play the newest social game, I might either think this is a huge violation of my trust, or I might be excited to play this new awesome game. So again, this is a subjective matter. I think the only good way to handle spammy direct messages is on a human basis. Unfollowing will always do the trick. As for me, any direct message request to digg something, retweet something, play a game, etc. will result in an unfollow, in the least.

I don’t think this problem is going away. In fact, I think this type of activity will accelerate rapidly. To avoid losing friends, please don’t using twitter as a marketing tool. Provide genuine human interaction. And if you want to broadcast your social gaming activity, consider making another twitter account so people can follow that if they are interested.