If I’m honest I can’t really tell you where the inspiration for Lobaco came from. Sure the idea itself is pretty simple (what’s going on there?) but I can’t really tell you what place or event first inspired me. The pursuit of the idea itself is much easier as it basically comes down to my inner dialog that constantly shouts put up or shut up at the back of my head and I felt hypocritical telling people to aggressively pursue their goals if I myself didn’t do the same thing. The 3 redesigns and one renaming Lobaco have much more solid roots having all stemmed from taking a break from developing and then taking a fresh look at the work I was doing.
Most of the inspiration came from a conscious desire to improve the product. In an effort to duplicate what I currently perceived as success many of the changes came from me taking ideas from places like Twitter and Foursquare and wrangling them into my product. Some of these ideas worked quite well like the UI redesign that took some serious cues from Twitter (large post box in the middle of the screen, 3 column layout) and others like the achievement service which mirrored Foursquare’s badge system (only has one unlockable, First Post!) proved to be a whole lot of effort for not a whole lot of gain. If you’re one of the brave souls testing the iPhone client (you can sign up here) you’ll notice that the latter feature is completely absent, for that exact reason.
Unconsciously however I believe I was thinking that Lobaco would end up being the platform upon which location based communication would be done. Sure many of the design decisions I made like making the API RESTful and JSON based were to increase cross-platform compatibility but ultimately I knew that the real power was being a platform, and even blogged to that effect. Whilst I don’t believe Lobaco suffered unduly because of this I hadn’t really considered the influence that outside forces were having on me subconsciously until 4chan creator Christopher “moot” Poole said this:
One of the biggest startup cliches is that every other startup wants to become a platform for other startups to build on. But to Christopher Poole, the founder of Canvas and 4Chan, that is the wrong approach. “People get caught up in trends—game mechanics, building a platform,” he tells Chris Dixon in the Founder Stories video above. Instead of trying to copy what works for others, founders should “focus on building what you love, focus on the product and building the community.”
He doesn’t understand “this obsession with building platforms. Focus on building something worth scaling. You don’t even have something worthy of an API yet. Focus on users and have them fall in love with your thing.” Amen.
Indeed many of the ideas I had emulated in Lobaco were done because I saw other successful companies doing them and figured that they would work for me as well. In reality I would have been much better served by focusing on the core product, refining the idea to the point where its utility was obvious to anyone. Since the idea was hinged on the idea of localized information I probably should have done things backwards, getting the core handset product right before attempting to bring it onto the web. That would have forced me to cut all of the fat out of the application, lest I create a cluttered and useless handset experience.
No matter how hard you try to fight it you will always be influenced by your experiences and for an information junkie like myself this meant that the service I was building emulated those which I considered most successful. My latest endeavor (which shall remain a secret, for now) is already showing signs of this kind of influence but I’m at least taking the lessons learned from Lobaco and applying them aggressively. I’m hoping this current project will be the fast track to self-sustainability that I’ve been hungering after for almost 2 years now and hopefully the time spent in the trenches for Lobaco will pay dividends in bringing this project to fruition.
