Foursquare: the startup zombie that still eats your data | Sidebean

0:00Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade Electrolites, Zero Sugar, and Vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolites. This video is brought to you by us, Slight Bean. We help startups get their ideas investor ready. Check us out at Slightbean.com or with the link in the description. All of us millennials didn't. At least once, we checked in on Forrestbro. Maybe we held the mayor status for a few days. Maybe we even have a super user badge. So you and I and millions became one more piece of the puzzle. And we still are, but how is EnforSquare dead right now? Isn't this company forensics? Well, that's what you might think. But chances are you're still using Forrestbro, even if you don't know it. Correction, actually. Forrestbro is using you. But let's talk about that in this episode of Company Forensics. In 2009, Dennis Crowley and Navine Selveduroy wanted to create a Twitter competitor,

1:00but with a twist, knowing where your friends were. So Forrestbro was born. And the idea was simple. The outlets you put in your location, a bar, a restaurant, a cafe, and all of those who followed you knew where you were. And you could post statuses about locations, review them. Some locations even had an automatic check-in system. Also, you could collect badges depending on your activity. And the most common visitor at any location would earn the mayor ship status, which for 2010's internet was huge. Being the mayor of a popular sport was equivalent to being verified by Twitter today, which I still don't have, by the way. Thanks to the Twitter integration, you could also tweet your location and DM your friends. The magic behind Forrestbro was discovering new venues from bookstores to cafes. Businesses got a boost from visits thus creating this many network for both consumers and businesses. I remember discovering a bunch of cool restaurants just because they were well reviewed on Forrestbro. But it could also lead to stocking, but that's not in the brochure. The idea caught on and it was so popular that some say it could become a worthy Facebook adversary. Rice and popularity. For a moment, this prediction seemed accurate. Forrestbro was the new cool kid on the block.

2:02Businesses were quick to place the Forrestbro logo on their wood nose and their contact forms. As for users, Forrestbro was also trending upward, knowing where your friends were and collecting badges became addictive. It was only a matter of time before celebrities got caught up in this Forrestbro hype. Some celebrities even created this celebrity mode, which allowed their fans to track them and other members of their crappy TV shows. Astronaut Doug Wheelock checked in on Forrestbro from the International Space Station. Enter him a NASA Explorer batch, which was a bit unfair. So to please those of us who didn't get to go to space, NASA created a special website for others to also earn the batch. Even Barack Obama checked in on a town hall meeting, not as a security concern. Businesses then created badges to help boost traffic. And for example, you could win free ice cream or pizza or even books depending on the places that you had visited in the past. And back then, Forrestbro was really huge. There was even talk of a unicorn valuation and plenty of interest from competitors. Yahoo was the first to knock on their door. In 2010, the giant offered somewhere between $100 and $120 million to acquire the company. But then, none other than Facebook came up

3:03with another $120 million offer. And after that, it is said that Crowley asked for $150 million to sell the company. And Zuckerberg walked away. Crowley insists that he was looking for the best future for the company. But as we're gonna see in a couple of years, the media really blasted him for not taking that money then. Because in no time, the acquisition talks were off the table. Forrestbro's numbers were the main reason. With only $1.35 million in revenue, investing $120 million for this product seemed crazy. So in no time, Forrestbro lost its traction. But why? Well, first of all, there's Facebook. Sure, Forrestbro had millions of users, but massive dominant Facebook was just too powerful. And there were other sexier social networks such as Instagram and Snapchat starting to grow up. And checking in is not a sexy as pictures, lots of pictures. Forrestbro lost ground fast. Crowley needed cash and with no deals, he saw it's investors. And reason Horowitz dished $20 million, which was almost heaven-scent. When by the time they've managed to raise it, Forrestbro didn't only face external competition.

4:04Crowley needed to go beyond the growth stage, which had eaten away the company's finances, but no money meant no innovation. So he raised another $50 million, with a $550 million valuation. That was about it, no more cash, because he was yet to show a worthy financial model. And making money was still Forrestbro's challenge. In 2012, for example, the company only made $2 million. So the media feasted on it and predicted a downfall. In 2013, business insiders said that Forrestbro would die by the end of the year. And that, it shouldn't be a surprise, but backstage Crowley was working some magic. Time for a turnaround. The irony was that Forrestbro was sitting on a part of gold. Did you just didn't know how to use it? All of those check ins, all those venues, locations, food traffic, what is all that? It's data, it's pure unadulter data, such as having 85 million places registered. And people love data these days. Forrestbro had so much data that business owners approached them with questions about their markets.

5:05Soon, 2014, Crowley ditched making friends. Now Forrestbro would be all about helping businesses, advertisers, brands, and developers. All thanks to their data. Now, before you raise your fist in the air, that's what the fine print is for. You agree to use Forrestbro, you agree to share your data. The challenge was to make it all work. The going gets rough. To fulfill this new goal, Forrestbro split and release the social network sworn. The apps do focused on checking in, but added a couple of new perks like close friends and close friend networks. Then the other app Forrestbro's city guide became a Yelp competitor. Again, users checked in and reviewed venues. Again, more data. And for a second, it seemed like the split would work immediately. But before the decision, Forrestbro really trended downwards in this download department of the app store. However, after the split, downloads increased. And there was much hype around both launches. Swarm, for example, meant to rank in the top 10 during August of 2014, but hype soon died down. By September, it had dropped below the thousand mark

6:06in both iOS and Android. Forrestbro, the other app was no different. Following the hype, it dropped well below the thousand position in iOS store. It seemed like the end was near, but perhaps propel fitness water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you propel with Gatorade electrolytes? Apps, that was the plan. The real goal. At the time, Crowley might have seemed delusional to some, but popularity wasn't Forrestbro's game anymore. You see, for years, the company had optimized its data, its tools and its technology. So the income would come from licensing all that hard work. And to do so, the company did need to make some changes. So Crowley stepped down as CEO in 2016, in came the COO Jeff Glouc to inject new energy into the company. But while the waters inside the company were shifting to the outside world, Forrestbro was disappearing. Unless you were really into reviewing and visiting places, there was no use for this app. Swarm also had mediocre results, even Crowley admitted it

7:09in 2017 that he didn't use it much as a social network. Instead, he insisted that the value was about logging your life by registering up to 100 places, you defeated the ephemeral nature of the other social networks. I remember when Forrestbro and Swarm split, I pretty much hated the change, because it was this weird interface problem where you had to go and check in on Swarm to then be redirected to Forrestbro and then the major ships lived here and then there. Then he said to me, that coin system in Swarm, which I think sucked. But I really, really loved Forrestbro, but it's that now. But Crowley did have a secret weapon called Pilgrim. Pilgrim was a software development kit that sensed whether a phone was moving in and out of a venue. Here's the catch. Users didn't need to press a check-in button. It did so on a magic. And yes, of course, this is intrusive, but again, you have to read the fine print. Selling Pilgrim made perfect sense. The automatic tracking could predict trends and show user behavior with more precision than ever. Plus Pilgrim belonged to Forrestbro. And Forrestbro didn't belong to big companies

8:11like Facebook and Google, which made it even more attractive for a specific type of user. By 2018, Forrestbro's data had three billion hits from a vast array of users. Plus, 25 million people worldwide had chosen to have always on data tracking. When you later, 150,000 developers had used their technology. That's a good chunk of change. In 2019, Forrestbro emerged with data companies factual and placed. And with these companies on their side, it had cemented its reputation as a data colossus. This meant finally, he saw a business model. And by the way, yes, SORM still exists. So do ribbons for typewriter. It's a niche product for a niche activity, life-logging, I suppose. Forrestbro's data and software now help power apps by Microsoft and Samsung and Twitter and Uber. In Q4 2020, the company had its first profitable quarter in over a decade. And in 2019, they showed revenue for more than $150 million. And honestly, there is no better ending here. So while we believe that Forrestbro had failed as a social network, and it did, it managed to reinvent itself. And yes, all thanks to you and me

9:12and the millions of people who just gave away our data. So I guess in the end, it was a social network, after all. We just didn't know we were a part of it. But we as slide-been also believe in working together, but for a different purpose. We help startups present to investors. Getting your ideas investor ready no longer has to be a challenge thanks to our pitch to builder. If you need help writing or designing your slides, you can have our team jump in and help you through the entire process. We can even help you build a financial model to estimate your revenue. Whenever you need more in-depth guidance, our team of experts is available for one-on-one sessions as well. We want you to pitch with confidence. So check us out at slidebeen.com or click that link in the video description. Thanks a lot for watching. We will see you next week.