An experiment in building a company: Perfecting the Loop

This is an experiment in how to build a company. It’s my fourth start-up. The businesses change, but the process for building a successful consumer product stays the same.

How it works: in one sense the product doesn’t much matter. I begin with a thesis about a need in the marketplace. The thesis is presented to people I respect and described with absolute conviction. I present it with conviction because I’ve found that without the conviction, most people will discourage you from venturing into a new place. The outward conviction — even when I lack the certainty myself — elicits the response for which I’m looking.

And it usually goes like this: ‘that wouldn’t work, but if you modified it to be like this then I think it would work.’ From the feedback, I modify as I think makes sense and then present again with conviction to a new person. The process continues, until the presentation reflects the reality, in so much as I’ve come to possess certainty.

But certainty in what? It’s not certainty in the exact offering, because only a fool could be certain that his or her guess will hit the bullseye. It’s certainty of a direction. And only a general direction.

For MeetMoi, the certainty is in this: someone will build a 100 million member community for location based mobile dating. The paradigm for dating will be the opposite of what exists in the online PC-tethered world, in so much as the dating will be ‘push’ based, rather than pull. Here’s what I mean: in the traditional online dating site, a user queries: I’m a man looking for a woman between the ages of X and Y. The system returns a set of results.

In the mobile world, the experience will be: I’m available to date and I’m located on the corner of 8th and Broadway. Please send my profile to everyone who meets my criteria that’s close to me.

If my vision sounds specific in nature, in many ways it is. But from the thesis above, there are still a thousand permutations of the service that can be built. Let your mind wander for a second, and imagine all the different rules and circumstances that could apply to sending out profiles and chatting with someone over the phone.

So how do I come to the right answer on the right service from here?

Build the perfect Loop.

The Loop is the cycle between marketing; listening to what users say; modifying the product; and then marketing again. Technology companies have the opportunity to shrink the time frame for the loop like no other industry. Think for a minute how long a Loop would take to make for a manufacturer of automobiles or a manufacturer of jeans.

In 2007, just about anybody can find a partner with a userbase or buy a mailing for a relatively modest amount and drive people to a page. The question is not, ‘can you get people to come?’ Rather, it’s what will they do once they come. And how quickly can you learn what they like and don’t like? And when you learn what they like and don’t like, how quickly can you pivot to modify your offering?

MeetMoi is still in its earliest stages. We’re shortly to introduce pictures to accompany the text based profiles we’re sending out now.

My goal has always been to perfect the Loop. This time I’m going to try to build the Loop in public with the hope of shrinking the timeframe still further. Your comments are welcome. I’ll share feedback and features as we go.

Social Networking: In Need of Definition

This morning, the New York Times reported about social networking’s next incarnation with the development of networks within corporate

America. Unfortunately, the phrase ‘social networking’ has been used in so many different contexts its meaning has morphed to the point where it’s not clear what the term means anymore. In the sixdegrees context – we always talked about social networking as meeting the people you don’t know through the people you already know. We defined degrees as a measurement in people from you, beginning with relationships you had that preceded your involvement in a website. My college roommate is my first degree. His friend from high school is my second degree.

At I Stand For, a political technology consulting company I founded in 2003, we brought social networking in the truest sense to political campaigns. I remember pitching one of our early gubernatorial clients on the value of endorsements. I told him that people cared less what prominent politicians had to say about him and more what their mother or other people in their first degree had to say about him. This latter type of endorsement led to honest creation of a social networking brought to political campaigns. We wrapped it a module called ‘endorsements.’

The same can’t be said of most ‘social networks’ on the web today. Whether its MySpace, or Twitter, or Nike’s new social network, most friends are found on the site and are based on common interests, rather than a prior connection that existed offline. In the 90’s we called this an online community, not a social network.Years ago, we predicted at sixdegrees that one social network would eventually overlay the entire Internet and that different applications would sit on top of that network. This type of ‘infrastructure’ paradigm seems to be gaining traction for a company like Plaxo, but for most second generation social networks, it seems to be moving in the opposite direction. My prediction: in the future, one or two serious social networks will occupy dominant positions and play the same role as that of your local White Pages of telephone numbers. There will be lots of communities, some dominant, some local in nature, some a combination of the two, that will play meaningful roles in how people interact (including dating).

With any luck, the definitions for a social network and online community will also morph over time so we can all understand the distinctions.