Three and half years ago, Aneel Ranadive founded Pinchit, Inc. Originally a daily deals site for events and activities in San Francisco, Ranadive raised a seed round of a few million dollars from angel investors including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Tim Draper, and others (Sanjay Subhedar, Naren Gupta, Arjun Gupta, Magdalena Yesil). Pinchit earned $1.5M in revenue in the first year in San Francisco with 100,000 monthly users, but pivoted after demand for deals decreased.
The next iteration of Pinchit was a social "scrapbook" for your city. Pinchit kept the name pinchit.com and featured a bookmarklet on its website. Users could install the bookmarklet on their browser to save the best local events and activities from various blogs and deal sites to keep track of things to do and to share them with friends. Pinchit remained popular in San Francisco, but struggled to expand to other cities.
On a trip to the Kairos Summit in NYC last spring, Aneel partnered with his now co-founders Josh Rosenheck, Mike Verderese, and Doug Carney. The group (minus Ranadive) had recently graduated from Rutgers University and previously launched a Top 10 Paid Entertainment app that went viral on college campuses.
At the Summit, Aneel recognized that he wanted to pivot the company and together the team brainstormed where to take Pinchit next. One thing Aneel realized from running Pinchit was that one of the biggest annoyances when getting together with friends is coordinating the actual meeting. Ranadive felt like the process always consisted of texting the same few friends "Hey what's up, where are you, what are you doing?" To answer this question, Ranadive expressed that you might drop a pin with Google Maps and take a screenshot to text to each friend, or you could turn on Apple's Find My Friends app and add friends to it. But ultimately believed that no one really wants to be tracked all the time. Another option Ranadive shared was that you could check in on foursquare. But that downside, he expressed, was this broadcasts to all your friends when you usually want to share with just a few.
The team believed there must be an easier way to let a few friends know where you are and what you are up to, but surprisingly nothing existed. This was the motivation behind the team's second pivot, their creation of the mobile app, Tag. Tag lets you quickly share your location with the friends of your choice. You open the app, check-in, select the friends you want to share with, and that's it. If you move to a new location, you can share again but if you don't, you're not tracked so you're in control of your privacy. You can also attach a photo or video to a "tag" to spice up the moment shared and so friends see what you're up to.
Their mission ultimately is to help bring people together more often in the real world. According to Ranadive, if Tag helps friends stay in touch just a little better and helps people serendipitously meet up more frequently when they see how frequently friends pass through their vicinity, then the founders will be happy.
I had a chance to connect with Aneel this past week and he told me about what they have going on at Tag.
Alexander Taub: You just changed the name of Marco Polo to Tag. Why?
Aneel Ranadive: We first came up with the name "Marco Polo" because we thought the game you play in the pool as a kid is a fun visualization of how the app works. You send someone your location, i.e. "marco" them and they see where you are then they can respond back with their own location - "polo." We found that people thought the name was fun, but still didn't immediately get the right picture of a location sharing app. The name also didn't make sense to more international users.
As we thought about changing the name, we also did a major redesign. We simplified the app, improved performance, and added video capability so you can attach videos to your location tags. With these changes, the new app felt different enough from the existing "Marco Polo" version that we thought it would make sense to just relaunch and rebrand. We settled on "Tag" because it's simple, fun and playful and the game of tag is more international and alludes to the back and forth sharing nature of the app. You send your location to the friends of your choice to let them know what you're up to, and then they "tag" you back with their own locations and ultimately the goal is to meet up.
Taub: What does a user get from Tag that they don't get from other location apps like foursquare?
Ranadive: Tag is unique because it is the only app that lets you tell specific people your location without broadcasting to your entire social network, and without being tracked. When you check-in on Foursquare or Facebook, you send your location to everyone who's following you. With Apple's "Find My Friends," when you share your location with someone it tracks everywhere you go so you have to be careful who you share with. Tag is great when you want to let just a few people know where you are at a specific moment, and but you don't want to be tracked indefinitely afterwards. For example you could use Tag to invite a couple friends to join you for a drink, you could tell a few family members where you are while you're say traveling, or you could let a co-worker know where you are to meet up for lunch. Also instead of selecting the same friends to share with each time, you can create custom lists on Tag for easier group sending - for example I could have lists for friends, co-workers and family and with just a couple clicks let each group know at separate times where I am and what I'm up to.
Taub: What are your goals with Tag for the rest of 2014?
Ranadive: We want to create the best possible location sharing platform for people to easily let others know where they are and connect safely and privately with friends, family or even fans. We think Tag does location sharing right with the perfect combination of privacy and control for people to feel comfortable using the app to let friends know where they are and meet up more often and the goal in 2014 is to identify what types of people need Tag the most and improve the app for them. For example, we've started working with artists and sports teams who will use Tag to send unique content to their fans to engage and reward them for their loyalty. Artists, teams or promoters could run contests and let fans send in tags showing support, then easily reward them with tickets, special content, or a chance to meet up or get backstage passes just to give a couple scenarios.
Taub: Talk more about taking online interactions offline. Why is this interesting to your team?
Ranadive: One thing we hear about often from people using Tag with friends is that friends come into your surrounding vicinity a lot more often than you would think and this has led to many serendipitous meetups that wouldn't have happened. Tag is literally bringing friends together. When you see a friend is only a block or two away, you usually go make the effort to meet up quickly and say hello. There is also a psychological aspect where seeing friends on a map, even if they're far away, kind of motivates you to close the gap and meet up with them more frequently. There are so many technologies making it easier to do things remotely, so perhaps Tag can be an important counter-force in that helps bring people together just little more often restoring a bit of real face to face real human interaction. This is a really powerful incentive for us to make a great product.
Taub: This is the third iteration of Pinchit. What have you learned from the previous two products that will help make Tag successful?
Ranadive: The theme all along has been helping a young, urban demographic have positive, real life experiences. With the first version of Pinchit, we negotiated deals on the best events and activities in SF for people to get out and take advantage of the city. Pinchit was popular in SF - we had hockey stick growth in revenue and subscribers but there was fierce competition in the space from other deal sites, many with a lot more venture funding and the space kind of collapsed. The next iteration of Pinchit, a social scrapbooking site for events, also aimed to help people have great experiences but we wanted to focus only on the best content regardless of whether or not a deal was available. Our premise was that by giving people tools to collect and the best local content - favorite restaurants, bars, and things to do - that the product would spread virally and eventually local businesses could advertise on Pinchit. The site got to about 100K monthly users mostly in SF, but expanding to other cities was much more difficult because we had to restart in each new city. We also faced fierce competition in the space from dozens of local blogs, apps and sites all aimed at helping people discover great local things.
After struggling to expand beyond SF, we wanted to pivot and solve a problem that we felt no one else was really working on or doing right. We wanted to stay in the local / social space and continue focusing on the same young urban demographic (which is essentially ourselves). From working on Pinchit, we realized that coordinating mtg up with friends can be an arduous process in terms of trying to find out where everyone is and where people should go, and no app fit the need for privately letting a few friends where you are without being tracked so we just dove in and began building an app which has evolved to Tag.
We've taken many lessons with us from Pinchit. One obvious lesson is that everything is going mobile. An increasing number of users from Pinchit were accessing content from their phones instead of personal computers. A second lesson is to work on a really specific pain-point that no one else has come close to doing right. In a really crowded space like daily deals or local discovery, there is very little margin for error - you have to execute flawlessly for people to switch over to your service and you have to create a service that is 10x better than any competitors and having a bigger war-chest than any competitors does not hurt either. Another strategy is to focus on solving a really specific problem that no one else is doing and even a small, lean team can get mass adoption quickly and succeed with a great product. Foursquare is pivoting toward content discovery getting away from the "check-in" and we haven't seen anyone else noteworthy who is really thinking about location sharing, so there is a massive opportunity for Tag to get it right.
Lastly, I would say we've learned the importance of staying lean at the early stage because it's easier to move quickly. We’ve had principles of the “lean startup” reinforced in different ways through experience, for example we believe in having short release cycles and iterating quickly. This allows us to get fast feedback and keep improving the product into a great service that people love and “have to have” because it fits a unique need.
Taub: How do you download Tag?
Ranadive: Tag is available for iPhone, with Android coming soon. Search "Tag you're it" in the app store or go to gettagapp.com.
