In regards to Flytivity (introduce people to each other at airports):
PG:You don’t know where people are going unless you expect them to tell you all the time. You have to find a subset of people who super-want to talk to one another. Enough to seek out and sign up for something they aren’t using. If I were you i’d stat over. You’ve spent 60 days on this. Plenty of companies start over after 60 days. The very best startups solve problems that founders themselves have. What is the worst problem in my life.
First idea that popped into my head: frequent fliers who like to sleep around and/or cheat on their spouses. If you're always on the go, away from home (for better or worse), an app connecting like-minded people easily might have a viable group of customers. Basically, a mobile/geo version of AdultFriendFinder.com. Want to share a hotel room to fool around in, and save some money by doubling up? Stranded out of town with nothing to do? Etc...
People will go out of their way for sex, including logging into an app and planning ahead. The question is, how big is the customer base, and what are they willing to pay? Do you end up with too many men and not enough women? Perhaps it's different between W4M, M4W, M4M, W4W.
I'm not sure the protocol for posting here but I'm the founder that was told to "start over". Probably won't but I at least wanted to give a mini-pitch, which I was told not to do on stage.
Flytivity is less like Sonar in that frequent flyers will share their travel itinerary before they travel, through the portal or most likely through TripIt. Flytivity pushes profiles of other business people that they might want to connect with in the airport, at the conference or traveling to that city via email the day before you travel; from there they can see how their connected (via linkedin (1st, 2nd 3rd level) or twitter) as well as other commonalities they might have with someone totally unconnected. You will also be able to initiate direct message right from the email.
Within the app the user can build a trip, check out who they might meet on future trips, see who's in town on a current trip as well as post in the city/conference forum about events.
With 460 million business trips on the books for this year, Flytivity was created with the business class traveler in mind. We know status and upgrades are important. We know you don't want to talk to just anyone, which is why you talk to no one. We also know that one face to face meeting can grow your business or career. We want to help make that happen.
"We know you don't want to talk to just anyone, which is why you talk to no one. We also know that one face to face meeting can grow your business or career. We want to help make that happen."
If that's the real problem you're trying to solve, it seems sites like LetsLunch.com do a better job of this, partially b/c they don't have to deal with the artificial constraint of having people be in transit somewhere.
First idea for me was Foursquare that people send out via twitter. You literally get a consistently named location. Do twitter searches on those names. Then @reply them telling them that they should check flytivity.
Mentioning user checkin counts and or active users in the airport would prompt interest. If people are comfortable with creating their own profiles that are publicly available you can then scan to see if someone's in your line of work or interests.
Bonus points if you could create groups so that people coagulate and increase the comfort of meeting people knowing that everyone is a stranger and it buffers you from weirdos as it's more likely some people are normal/interesting/cool.
The problem with Flytivity is that Sonar does everything already, much better.
They have solved the chicken-egg problem in a very clever way, by mining the web for info about people you'd like to meet, who are where you are, and who don't necessarily use the service. "Sonar is useful even if no one else is on Sonar".
If you can get women to use it you've got a business there.
You might be able to partner with local hotels and/or restaurants and offer discounts for couples who use the app. But you need to to structure it so the "free meal" voucher thing goes to a woman, but she can only use it if she goes with another person.
But the m4m market could be the most lucrative. Look at... that senator whose name I forget. Wouldn't it be much easier to solicit random sex via your phone than try to do it in a cubicle? And heck, it's probably a lot more pleasant for everyone who has to use those cubicles.
Of course in order to make this happen you'd probably need to build a general-purpose "meet people with common interests" app, just to provide some plausible deniability (either to others, or to one's own self). "Oh no, that's not a random gay sex app, I just like to meet other... model railroad enthusiasts..."
One more thing: by the time you've done all this, there's no point in restricting it to airports, is there?
While I am a very faithful person (not that you're not, but just to be clear), this is shockingly delightful and I think your business sense is top-notch.
PG:You don’t know where people are going unless you expect them to tell you all the time. You have to find a subset of people who super-want to talk to one another. Enough to seek out and sign up for something they aren’t using. If I were you i’d stat over. You’ve spent 60 days on this. Plenty of companies start over after 60 days. The very best startups solve problems that founders themselves have. What is the worst problem in my life.
First idea that popped into my head: frequent fliers who like to sleep around and/or cheat on their spouses. If you're always on the go, away from home (for better or worse), an app connecting like-minded people easily might have a viable group of customers. Basically, a mobile/geo version of AdultFriendFinder.com. Want to share a hotel room to fool around in, and save some money by doubling up? Stranded out of town with nothing to do? Etc...
People will go out of their way for sex, including logging into an app and planning ahead. The question is, how big is the customer base, and what are they willing to pay? Do you end up with too many men and not enough women? Perhaps it's different between W4M, M4W, M4M, W4W.