Jake Kring and Mack Kolarich spoke at our past event on Thursday, February 17. They are currently in open beta with GetSpontaneous.com, a location-based social networking platform. We had a chance to get Jake and Mack’s take on their startup and where it might go from here.
Media Future Now: How did you come up with the idea for GetSpontaneous?
Mack: The first spark occurred when I saw a cluttered happy hour schedule at a crowded bar in August. I realized that while just about every bar has a happy hour, there is no easy way to find out where the nearest happy hour is right now. You could go to Yelp or Foursquare, search for nearby bars, and then patiently read through descriptions of each, searching for mentions of a happy hour. But who has time for that? I realized that this problem extends far beyond bars: there’s no way to find out what’s going on around you, right now, that you’ll actually be interested in.
So I reached out to Jake (we’d been working together on some previous startup concepts).
Jake loves concerts (especially hip hop shows), and coincidentally he’d recently missed a performance by Black Thought. Not because he didn’t have the time or money (tickets were only 10 bucks), but because he didn’t know the show was happening (until it had already happened).
Jake needed a way to unlock his neighborhood at any time, and see what was going on five streets over from his current location. As Jake and I talked more and more about this problem, our solution started to take shape. It revolved around events. Most things we do for fun are events – happy hours are recurring events, a flashmob is an impromptu event, an intramural dodgeball game is a planned event. We wanted to build a platform that discovers and sorts events in your neighborhood, and puts them on your smartphone. As our idea took shape, Jake and I became more and more excited, to the point where we couldn’t fall asleep. It’s been GetSpontaneous from there.
Media Future Now: How is GetSpontaneous distinct from other location-based services?
Jake: There are a lot of startups vying for a piece of the location-based pie. Each has taken a unique approach. Here’s what makes GetSpontaneous distinct:
Our ideal event is small (really small). We hope to act as a platform for poetry slams and happy hours, pickup soccer games and community service projects. We call these “Micro-Events.”
Similarly, we aim to build a social graph that maps fleeting relationships, which we call “Micro-Networks.” For example, that guy at the Roots concert last night, while not necessarily your ‘friend’ in a Facebook sense, likely shares some interests with you. And if he’s attending a forum on Masculinity in Hip Hop, maybe you’d be interested in attending, too.
We’re an aggregator. That means we’re datasource agnostic. Sure, we’d love every mom and pop shop across the country to be posting events on our platform, but we know that’s a long term goal. In the short term we’ll integrate with other APIs. We’ll collect parties from Eventbrite, concerts from StubHub, coupons from Groupon, and meetings from Meetup. We’ll consolidate them all, and order them by level of potential interest to you.
This leads me to my final point: we’re personalized. Our goal is to show you events that you’ll be interested in. Every time you “Follow a Tag,” or “Drop In” to an event, we update your personal algorithm. So if you drop in to a professional soccer game today, we’ll show you a soccer skills workshop tomorrow.
Media Future Now: On your website, you propose a few possible business models. Have you gotten a better sense of what might be the best way to generate revenue?
Jake: I am a data-nerd. I love data. My dream is to map the movement and energy of people across a city in real-time. With that said, I think usage of personal data has gotten really out of hand. All too often, people sign up for a social network and provide personal data with the expectation of it being used in one way, only to find out that it has been used in a very different way. Our goal is to be abundantly explicit about the use of personal data.
Our fundamental belief, when it comes to data, is that business and consumer incentives are in fact aligned. So this cat and mouse game, in which businesses steal data from consumers to target them for the purposes of advertising, is not just irresponsible, it’s inefficient. Consumers want to know about events near them that relate to their personal interests, and businesses want to reach relevant consumers. We aim to be the conduit through which this data flows.
So GetSpontaneous’ main source of income will be the sale of anonymous data for micropayments. If a coffee shop holds an open-mic night, odds are they’ll be willing to pay 99 cents for a report on the interests and demographics of people who showed up. Obviously none of these reports would include usernames or email addresses, but detailed anonymous insight is almost as valuable (and doesn’t compromise anyone’s privacy). Large corporations make executive decisions based on interest and demographic data every day. But that system is opaque (and I can guarantee it’s not anonymous). Isn’t it time small businesses have access to the same tools that corporate america does?
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