A VC: mobile

76 posts categorized "mobile" — Table of Contents – Audio

Dec 5, 2012

Rethinking Mobile First

I wrote the Mobile First Web Second blog post a few years ago. In that post, I talked about apps that were designed to be used on mobile primarily with the web as a companion.

There have been a number of startups that have taken that approach and done well with it. Most notably Instagram, and also our portfolio company Foursquare. It has become a bit of a orthodoxy among the consumer social startup crowd to do mobile first and web second.

But is it the right thing to do? Vibhu Norby, co-founder of Everyme and Origami, wrote one of the most thought provoking posts of the past month arguing that mobile first is a recipe for failure for most, if not all, startups.

Vibhu makes some excellent points:

All in all, mobile service apps turn out to be a horrible place to close viral loops and win at the retention game. Only a handful of apps have succeeded mobile-first: Instagram, Tango, Shazam, maybe 2 or 3 others.

and

You have an entirely different onboarding story on the web. You can test easily, cheaply, and fast enough to make a difference on the web. You can fix a critical bug that crashes your app on load 15 minutes after discovery (See Circa). You can show 10 different landing pages and decide in real-time which one is working the best for a particular user. You can also close a viral loop: A user can click an email and immediately be using your app with you. You can’t put parameters on a download link and people don’t download apps from their computer to their phone. Without the barrier of a download + opening the app to try your product, you can prove value to the user immediately upon their first impression, as is with Google. In addition, the experience of signing up for a service is superior in every way. Typing is easier. Sign-up with OAuth is faster. Tab to the next field. Provide marketing alongside sign-up as encouragement. Auto-fill information is a feature in every browser. The open eco-system of the web and 20 years of innovation has solved many of the most difficult parts of onboarding. With mobile, that kind of innovation is lagging significantly behind because we create apps at the leisure of two companies, neither of which have a great incentive to help free app makers succeed.

and

I use my phone more than anything else. I just don’t think that an entrepreneur who wants a real shot at success should start their business there. The Android and iOS platform set us up to fail by attracting us with the veneer of users, but in reality you are going to fight harder for them than is worthwhile to your business. You certainly need a mobile app to serve your customers and compete, but it should only be part of your strategy and not the whole thing.

Vibhu also takes a stance against the ad-supported, privacy challenged, free consumer app world. I respect that stance and every time I upgrade from a free ad supported app to a premium version (advertising free) via the in app upgrade on mobile, I express my solidarity with him on that one. But as a business person, I have and will continue to advocate for a free tier with a premium upgrade (or just entirely free) because as I have written many times on this blog, I think that is the value maximizing approach and it also allows the greatest number of users to access your product or service.

But I don't want to focus on business model in this post. We are at the start of what will be a long MBA Mondays series on business models and will be talking a lot about that.

What I want to focus on is the paradox that mobile is where the growth is right now and that mobile is very very hard to build a large user base on. Everything that Vibhu says in his post is right. Building an audience on mobile is a bitch. I talked about that in my what has changed post:

distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. you need to master the "download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen" flow and that is a hard one to master

But just because something is hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it. I am convinced the next set of large and valuable consumer facing services will be built with mobile as the primary user interface. You can see it in the success of Uber and Etsy this holiday season. That's where you users are most of the time. And if you don't design your products and services for what is rapidly becoming the dominant UI, you will not maximize the success of your business in the long run.

So do I disagree with Vibhu? Not at all. I think he makes some great points on why you might not want to go mobile only unless you are in the games business. But I differ in two important areas. First, I think you can't abandon mobile. It is the future like it or not. And second, I think it is critical to design for mobile first and then build a web companion. If you design for the web and then port to mobile, you will find that it is really hard to fit your UI onto the small screen. Better to design for mobile first and then build a web companion. Mobile first, web second. But as Vibhu points out, the web can't and should not be ignored. It is valuable in many many ways.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile, Venture Capital and Technology, Web/Tech /

Nov 25, 2012

What Has Changed

As I read this post in the WSJ about the changing nature of VC funding of consumer web companies, I thought that we may be looking at the symptoms and not the disease. As the WSJ notes, VC funding of consumer web and mobile companies is down 42% in this first nine months of 2012 (vs the first nine months of 2011). And the big falloff is not in seed rounds, which are still getting done, but in follow-on rounds, which are not.

So what has changed in the past couple years? A lot, actually.

1) the consumer web has matured. we are almost 20 years into the consumer web and we have large platforms that are starting to suck up a lot of the oxygen. google, facebook/instagram, amazon, microsoft, apple, twitter, ebay, yahoo, AOL, craigslist, wordpress, linkedin together make up a huge amount of the time spent online, particularly in the english speaking world. there are still occasional new entrants into this list and departures too. tumblr and pinterest have risen a lot in the past couple years while myspace has declined. but consumer behaviors are starting to ossify on the web and it is harder than ever to build a large audience from a standing start.

2) the consumer is moving from desktop/web to mobile/app. we've talked about this transition ad nauseam on this blog. it is the single biggest megatrend in the consumer internet space right now. most new consumer internet startups need to build for iOS, Android, and web at the same time. it is making the startup more expensive and time consuming. distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. you need to master the "download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen" flow and that is a hard one to master.

3) the momentum/late stage investors have moved from consumer to enterprise. there is a large pool of money in the venture capital asset class that is opportunistic, momentum driven, and thesis agnostic. this pool is driven largely by the public markets. this pool of capital was "all in" on consumer web/social web in the 2009-2011 time frame. it drove a lot of activity throughout the venture capital markets because each layer of the VC stack (angel, seed, Srs A, Srs B, Srs C, etc) needs to be aware of what the next layer up wants to fund. when the momentum/late stage wanted web/social, the layers below gave them web/social. now that the momentum/late stage wants enterprise, we should expect the layers below to give them enterprise.

The combination of these three factors is making it harder for consumer internet companies (web and mobile) to get funding. But the first two factors are also making it harder for consumer internet companies (web and mobile) to breakout which is more and more a prerequisite for funding. As venture portfolios fill up with promising companies with solid products that are struggling to breakout, the VCs will naturally be drawn ever more to the companies that are in fact breaking out. It is a pernicious cycle and we see it playing out very clearly in the consumer internet space these days.

What does that mean for USV? Well not that much actually. We are thesis driven to the core. We believe in what we believe in, for good or bad. And that is large networks of engaged users that have the power to disrupt big markets. We are investing at the fastest rate right now in the history of our firm. We are doing a lot of Srs A and Srs B rounds right now because that is where we see the biggest vaccum in the market. We have not done a real seed or angel round in quite a while. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't and our next investment could well be a seed or angel round.

But we are a small firm. We put out maybe $40mm to $50mm per year across all of our core funds, across initial investments and follow-ons. That is a tiny fraction of the venture capital market. We are small on purpose. We don't want to be the market. We want to invest in a tiny slice of the early stage ecosystem where our thesis collides with great teams and unique and differentiated products.

All that said, these three trends are impacting our portfolio. We have fifty portfolio companies, with the vast majority in the consumer internet space. We encouraged our portfolio companies to raise a lot of capital in 2011 and many did. But even so, we are seeing fundraising challenges everywhere, even in our very best portfolio companies. We are also seeing many of the youngest companies in the portoflio, those started after the summer of 2010, struggling with the breakout challeneges I mentioned earlier in this post. We are patient investors and believe in our portfolio companies and the teams we have funded. We are seeing patience being rewarded, particularly in the mobile market. But it is a tougher time for early stage consumer internet companies than I have seen since the 2001-2004 time frame. And I think we are still in the early innings of this more challenging environment.

So things have changed. As they always do in tech. Those who adapt to the changing dynamics, who see the openings that were not there before and slice through them, will succeed. But the wind that has been at our back for 7-8 years in consumer internet is no longer there. It's tougher sledding and will likely continue so for some time to come.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile, Venture Capital and Technology, Web/Tech /

Nov 15, 2012

Turntable 2.0 and Passion Pit

The folks at Turntable aren't calling it 2.0, but it sure feels like a massive upgrade to me so that's what I call it when I talk about the new UI and big rooms concept that Turntable quietly launched yesterday without much fanfare.

Full disclosure, USV is an investor in Turntable and I am on the board.

Turntable.fm, for those that don't know, is a live social music experience. Anyone can start a room in the service and a room features up to five users who jump up on stage and take turns DJing, and then the rest of the folks in the room listen, rate the songs, and chat. It is the most social music experience I have ever experienced online. I spend most mornings between 5am and 7am eastern hanging out in Turntable. Like most social online services, I have friends there who I have never met in person. I get better music discovery at Turntable from people I have never met than I get from anywhere else.

It makes sense if you think about it. Folks who are so passionate about music that they get up on stage and DJ live in front of everyone else will also likely have spent countless hours finding music that nobody else knows about yet. That's how music has always worked and how it will always work.

Turntable's achilles heel has always been that the rooms didn't scale. In version 1.0, when a room got to 200 people, it closed up to new entrants. So if you showed up looking to get into your favorite room you could often be out of luck. That is not and never was a good user experience.

Worse is that when a musician, artist, or celebrity showed up in one of the rooms, only 200 of their fans could get in to hear what they were up to. So the whole viral nature of an artist with hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans tweeting out that they are in a room in Turntable was mostly wasted in version 1.0.

All of that has been fixed in Turntable 2.0. The rooms scale up as more users show up. The UI changes in real time. A room starts out feeling like a tiny club and could end up feeling like an arena concert. Here's an example of a "big room" in action:

It's a real work of UI art and kudos go out to Billy and Byron for their work in building the new Turntable UI.

They've also made a bunch of smaller changes, cleaned some things up, moved some things around, speeded it up considerably, and made the service easier to join and get into quickly. I've been watching this new version emerge over the past few months and am so excited as a user to be able to experience it myself now.

If you want to see a big room in action, you can log into Turntable today at 3pm eastern to catch the electropop act Passion Pit playing some of their songs in Turntable. I expect that room will fill up nicely. I am going to try to get in and check it out myself in between running around SF between meetings. I hope to see you there.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile, Music, Web/Tech /

Nov 14, 2012

DuoLingo iPhone App

Our portfolio company DuoLingo has released its first mobile app, DuoLingo for iPhone.

Language learning is definitely something that lends itself to doing here and there when you have some downtime, like standing in line, sitting on the train, waiting for the movie to start.

So if you really want to learn a new language or improve your mastery of another language, check out DuoLingo on the iPhone. It's an entirely free app and they are supporting French, Spanish, and German to start. More languages will be coming soon.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile /

Oct 19, 2012

Feature Friday: Twitter Mobile Notifications on Android

I was at a USV event last week in SF and I bumped into Sung Hu Kim, a product manager at Twitter who handles mobile stuff. We got to talking about things I'd love the Twitter Android product to do. I mentioned that my daugther tweets a fair bit but I often miss them because I follow 735 people, many of them prolific tweeters. I do have a family list but I only get around to checking it every few days and I often miss opportunities to @reply to Emily.

Sung pointed me to the mobile notifications settings and we turned on notifications for Emily on my Android. Game changer! Now I get a notification every time she tweets and I can immediately favorite it, retweet it, or reply to it. I turned on notifications for about ten others including of course my wife.

Here's how to you do it (I assume this works on Twitter for iPhone too but I don't know for sure).

1) Navigate to someone's profile. You can do that by clicking on their avatar in a tweet. Here is my friend Bijan's profile on my phone.

2) Do you see that little image of a head under the block that says "tweets" on the middle left? You click that. And you get this dialog box.

Click on "turn on notifications". That's all you have to do.

3) Then you get notifications at the top of your home screen whenever someone you've added to mobile notifications tweets. Those notifications look like this (look at the very top of the home screen):

For those that are curious, that is Gilligan on my home screen. My friend Josh Harris painted that Gilligan and the original hangs in my office at USV. The Gotham Gal also has a Gilligan in her office. For those that know Josh and his obsessions, it has great meaning. It represents the crazy web 1.0 era in NYC in my mind. It is one of my favorite art pieces we own.

4) When you pull down the notifications tray on Android, you actually can see part of the tweet. And you can click on it to go to the tweet. Here's a notification of a tweet from Bijan (who I've added to my mobile notifications as well).

I have had this feature active on my phone for the past week and it has significantly increased my usage of twitter as I am now seeing in real time the tweets from the folks I care most about. I love it.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile /

Oct 17, 2012

Second Screen, Third Screen, ...

It's pretty common practice these days to pull out a tablet or phone during big live events and watch on two screens. The industry has taken to calling this the second screen experience. Or social TV. It's an area our firm has a few bets in, most notably Twitter and GetGlue.

But last night during the debate, I found myself in need of more screens. I could have used something like this:

attribution link

I had the #debates feed on my personal Nexus 7. I had John Heilemann's twitter feed on my phone. I had Tumblr going on my laptop. And I had CNN on the family room Nexus 7. And I was actually watching the debate first and foremost.

The big surprise was how active Tumblr was. The memes were coming fast and furious during the debate. The binders full of women meme was active within minutes of that line emerging from Mitt's mouth. The debate tag was also a great one to follow on Tumblr last night.

Based on the tweets I was seeing flying by on Twitter last night, I am certain that I'm not the only one who watched the debates this way. Actually I am pretty certain that this is becoming more normal by the day.

It all makes me wonder if the current crop of social TV apps are missing a big aggregation opportunity. I suspect lots of good stuff was going on elsewhere last night (Facebook, Pinterest, Canvas, etc), but I just didn't have enough screens in my family room to be everywhere at the same time. Maybe we need an app for that.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile, Television, Web/Tech /

Oct 2, 2012

A Changing Tablet Market?

I saw this in a story I was reading this morning about mobile reading habits:

A year ago, the iPad accounted for 81% of tablets in circulation. That has fallen to 52%, with Android-based tablets grabbing a 48% share of the market. Amazon’s Kindle Fire accounts for far and away the largest slice of those: half of the Android tablets in use are Kindle Fires, and they represent 21% of the overall tablet market.

If that's true, that is a big deal. Our family has moved from iPads to Nexus 7s in our home but I didn't think the rest of the world had moved to Android tablets too.

I am curious if others are surprised by this. I honestly had no idea that Android had made such a big move in tablets. I realize Kindle Fire is hardly Android. More like a third tablet OS. So it's really like iPad 52%, Android 27%, Kindle Fire 21%. But even so, this is a big deal and I am surprised.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile /

Sep 29, 2012

Video Of The Week

Saturday is always a tough day for me to blog. The weeks are long and I am often spent by friday afternoon. The weekend is a time for me to rejuvenate and restore. I often find the weekends bring out the best blog posts but saturday morning is always hard. In the past, I've punted by running a video on saturday morning. I think I am going to make that a more regular event. When I've got something to say, I will blog. When I don't, I'll run the most interesting video I've seen in the past week.

Today, I'm running a twenty minute conversation between two of my favorite people in Tech, @om and @dens. This talk is mostly about Foursquare, but they do touch on the future of maps, location services, UIs, and stuff like that. I enjoyed it and I hope you do too.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile /

Sep 14, 2012

Feature Friday: Link Preview

Google Chrome on the Jelly Bean version of Android is a joy to use, particularly on the 7" screen on the Nexus 7. I do almost all my web reading on that device now. Actually I do almost everything other than blogging on that device now, but I digress.

One of my favorite features in Chrome for Android is something called "link preview." When you touch a part of a web page with a lot of links on it, you get a popup that looks like this:

[image credit: http://www.mobilexweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/links.png]

That popup allows you to select the exact link you want. It is awesome.

However, it doesn't work on all websites. I am not entirely sure what is required on the website side to power this feature, but, for example, I can't get this feature to work on Hacker News where it would be awesome. It's entirely possible that I am doing something wrong. If so, I'd love to know what.

But this works on most websites I use and I have found it to be a very handy feature. I suspect it will become standard on mobile browsers, particularly on smartphones.

Nicely done Google.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile /

Sep 13, 2012

Wireless Charging

The Gotham Gal wrote a post on monday in her Woman Entrepreneur Mondays series on Elizabeth Ormesher who is building a startup called Everpurse. She is starting with a Kickstarter project and attempting to raise $100,000. Here's the video explaining her idea:

I bring this up because apparently Apple thinks that wireless charging is not easier. I would beg to differ. I think wireless charging is the future. And I think we will make more progress with wireless charging faster than we will increasing battery life, at least in the near term.

I just backed the Everpurse project (no reward for me) because I love the idea and I love the concept of wireless charging.

Comments (View) / posted in mobile /