Watching Foursquare Cross the Chasm

Foursquare has clearly picked up a lot of traction in the past year, but there’s been some mounting evidence recently that they are really about to hit a big tipping point.

Aside from all the high profile deals and user growth of late, here are some recent touch points just in my day-to-day life:

• I noticed Luke’s Lobster has a Foursquare mayor offer on the counter
• The new Tweetdeck features 4SQ on the welcome screen
• I casually mentioned 4SQ in passing to a ‘non-tech’ friend and they’d just downloaded it the day before

These little touch points are important harbingers. When they get populous enough, they tend to be in the process of merging together into a mainstream brand that will display incredible inherent velocity.

I remember this point in our adoption cycle from HotJobs. In the very early days, we had a sales gong for every time we sold an account to a recruiter. The rings were few and far between. Explaining our product was still a mouthful – the market paradigm wasn't there yet to just say ‘we're a job board.’

But effort over time, the strength of the idea, and luck came together to germinate little isolated patches of the yard:

• We signed some big accounts.
• Got some curiosity news hits.
• The product actually worked for some people.
• Competitors gained some traction and helped us create the market concept and footprint.
• etc.

The big tipping point for us was a Super Bowl ad. Richard Johnson mortgaged his house to pay for it. Not only was it the first year a crop of internet companies did Super Bowl ads – but bingo, our first ad got rejected for vulgarity by Fox. This PR coup meant we were featured in something like 80% of the news generated around the game. It felt like the world was suddenly rooting for us. Tom Brokaw closed his coverage with a thoroughly gratifying ‘sorry, this job’s taken.’

On a plane the next day, I overheard the people ahead of me talking about HotJobs – it was the first time I had ever heard a stranger mention the brand.

By the time I got back, the office was buzzing with not just everyone else having these kinds of ‘firsts’ – but with opportunity. As in – inbound opportunity. More incoming press, inbound sales calls, talented people wanting to join the team, biz dev deals, acquisition interest. It took a couple years to have gotten to that point but the actual moment of being there kind of did happen overnight.

We felt an incredible sense of confidence from that point forward – there was no going back – it’s not that the work was done, or challenges didn’t exist - but we had hit this point where a certain degree of success was just ensured. It’s like when you know you’ve won in solitaire, and you do the winner’s exercise of just playing out the rest of the cards.

Maybe at that point we were a $100m company. What was left to determine was whether we could be a $500m company, which is roughly where we exited, or even a $1b company, which is what we had the potential but not the wherewithal to become.

Our run would last I think another 36 months or so after that tipping point – and I would say it was specifically those 18 months just after the tipping point that involved such pure peak-zone enjoyment of our success. Not only was everything flowing, but idealism still characterized the effort.

From the outside – it seems like Foursquare is just getting into that 18-month-ish joy zone. I have to imagine that a lot of people there are becoming different human beings in the process, and forming relationships and experiences to be drafted on for entire careers. I hope that’s the case, and that it’s as energizing on the inside as it looks from the outside.

It would be great to see 4SQ execute to the tune of a $1b company. It takes almost miraculous endurance and personal capacity to develop both a market and a company to maturity -- the latter being the far more formidable.

Regardless, I hope they are enjoying every second of this – it is so fun to watch - and I for one am so glad to support it and participate in it even just thru my humble little East Village check-ins.

Good luck guys, pass the lobster!