How are you solving the chicken and the egg problem that plagues most location-based apps?
For example, I'm in multiple FB groups for playing pick-up in my area and see apps like Jogabo mentioned every now and then yet it never seems to gain traction and people just resort to posting on FB.
It's a tough problem – no doubt about it. In v1, as we expect your nearby network to be quite small, we've focused heavily on your existing friends network (from facebook) and are trying to make that experience as good as possible. Inviting them, organising the events, etc.
In the past, just like you, we used facebook groups and/or messages/chats back and fourth to friends.
Hopefully the app will be good enough for people to start out with their existing friends and then more and more people nearby will show up.
Chicken & egg. I once started with a similar idea - meeting sport buddies - but on a country scale. I found it very hard to gain enough traction for people to actually be able to meet each other.
Because.... what value does it bring for Joe who's living in SF, that Jane from NY wants to go for a work-out? I think "importing" events from other sites is one option to get things going (still - quite a lot of effort). Other idea - is to start locally, run a big ad campaign, get in touch with sport centers, etc, then "conquer" other cities, one by one.
Definitely agree here. This is the main problem to solve for these event organization/discovery apps. This is especially true when existing solutions like Meetup already have a lot of very useful features and when your solution doesn't bring a significant added value compared to makeshift solutions (10x improvement they say?? Maybe that's a little much).
It's also hard when you refuse to use black hat and spammy tactics ;) Hopefully you guys won't have to resort to that.
We have moved out of this space with Jogabo (the meetup for sports... Well for us it was for soccer only). We are now focusing on making a social app for players with a twist of discovery. We think it will solve the chicken and egg problem.
We're not giving up, because the situation is just plain lame as it stands now. Facebook, email, whatsapp just doesn't cut it. We're in Lisbon right now and everyone and their mom plays soccer here yet it's still as much of a pain. The only games we've actually played were through local Jogabo users actually!
Happy to tell you more if interested. Just ping me on twitter
What if you don't try to solve that but a different problem first? Make the app good enough for existing private teams to be usable!
E.g. we play weekly, organize the event through Facebook for years but still a pain sometimes. Somebody don't RSVP but still show up, so we are odd. Also Facebook events don't make it possible to limit the number of guests.
If you make it really easy to use and useful enough such a level that existing private groups will use it (and they stick because it makes their life easier), new people will come.
I once created something similar and ran in to similar problems. What I did was use various event apis (meetup, etc) and populate events from those in to my app while allowing users to create their own.
I was searching for an app exactly like this a few weeks ago. Super glad someone else built it so I don't have to. I think the biggest values I hope to get out of this are: (a) coordination of getting the activity together so that I don't have to deal with flakey friends and (b) connecting me to strangers who also want to play so that I can get a game together even when friends are out of town or don't want to play (I always seems to have more energy than they do). Looking forward to trying this out!
If anyone in Seattle wants to play some basketball near greenwood / phinney ridge area, I'm hosting at 7pm tonite at the Greenwood Elementary outdoor courts! Event is public on this app.
Wohoo, that's so cool to hear! There's something special about hearing from your first users around the world, and that they are actually using it for real stuff.
