Sometimes, you just have to pay attention.
Chris Dixon wrote an interesting blog post, regarding products build from improvised user behavior. We highly recommend you read it for yourself, but to summarize, some of today’s most popular technology startups were born from current behavior already present in niche culture. A good example mentioned by Chris:
“For a long time, there were niche communities of “lo-fi” camera enthusiasts: people who shared photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots. The iPhone app Hipstamatic popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1M copies. Because Hipstamatic lacked sharing features, many users took pictures with Hipstamatic and then shared them using other apps. Then came Instagram, which combined lo-fi filters and easy sharing. Instagram has been downloaded 15M times and has apparently crossed over to mainstream users.”
Other product ideas like Twitter and foursquare were also born from similar insights grounded in user behavior.
Phoundit fits this mold as well. People are human and lose things all the time. They post flyers on lamp posts. Post ads on Craigslist. And even a few post pictures of what they lose Twitter. Hmm, that’s interesting. So it got us thinking,
“What if we could centralize this behavior with actionable steps to mobilize the community to help us find what’s missing?”
A little food for thought as we enter the new year. We can’t wait to show what’s in store. Request an invite here. Stay tuned :).
Source phoundit
