(2011-05-06) Gist Social Address Book

Gist frames itself as a Social Address Book (Social Software).

Apr27'2011 interview with Andrew Warner:

• *(A key value from us:) I think that the dynamic building of profiles; which I still think we’re probably as good as anybody out there. So, you send me an email address, I send you back a very rich profile, a social business profile as we describe it. I think we’re still arguably the best, but I think we could have been a while order of magnitude better at that. And the next is always focusing on the logical next action with a contact. So, the followup, what am I supposed to do-, so here’s all this information, what am I supposed to do? And, you’ve seen slowly but surely more of that coming into the product, and we’ll be doing more of it, so it’s really helping me manage my relationships as much as it is giving me information and letting me infer what I should do next. So, focusing more on the logical next action.

• Andrew: I see. And both of those seem different from the combined single inbox (Universal Inbox). Are they?

• T. A.: In that sense, the inbox we’ve done very little with. Right? You can’t really send email from Gist, you don’t manage your inbox from Gist... Because I know how hard it is to actually build an EMail inbox, or a Twitter inbox, or a Facebook inbox and the amount of effort that’s required just to get to parity is huge. You’ve got to add spell check, and bullets and this and that. So the likelihood of actually building an inbox to replace your inbox is very low.*

• I mean, from the time we started ProtoTyping (in MsPowerpoint) until the time we launched something was more like six months... We had a “connect to my GMail inbox via IMAP and prioritize the list of people in my inbox based on sent messages” in two weeks.

• The first stage is that construct that I’ve talked about. You know, who’s the customer, what’s the Business Model, what’s the feature set, and what’s the value prop (Lean Canvas)? And if you get good at that, you can try a thousand ideas, you can do 20 of them today. And you start to write those down, and it’s almost like a mad lib... So you could write ten of those really quickly. And you’d say, “Okay, well, let’s say I wanted to stack rate those ten. Which one’s the most interesting? I don’t know, this one.” And then you start to break it apart a little bit. Okay, well, who’s the customer? Salespeople. Well, what are the attributes of salespeople? Do I know any salespeople? What else do salespeople buy? Okay, a little bit broader. Feature set. Social address book. What does that mean? Okay, break it apart. Address book part, yeah, social part, news part, and you know, you get better and better and better at that. And at some point you kind of either run out like, “I’m bored”, like “ehh, it doesn’t feel that interesting.” Or you then say, “And it’s better than”, which then you get into the competitive space, you’re like, “Hmm. I don’t feel like I can say that it’s better than what’s already there.” And then you sort of stop, throw that idea away. Or, it sits in the back of your mind, and I think what ends up – for most entrepreneurs that are successful – is an idea continues to just nag them in their brain. They’re like, “I know there’s something in here. I know it’s competitive, but the part that differentiates it, or this customer set, or the feature set – like, I think if we could just make it do ‘x’, it would be enough.” And that sort of nags you enough, and you usually have to have a Passion for the space. So, like, I have a lot of ideas in gaming, but I’m not a gamer. So, ideas for gaming, I lose interest in them relatively quickly because I don’t want to think about, I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to have a cup of coffee or a beer and talk about it with other people who talk about that sort of stuff, it’s just not that interesting to me. Whereas thinking about “how do I leverage my social graph”, “how do I connect more efficiently”, “how do I have better meetings”, like, a lot of people would think, “That’s boring, I don’t want to talk about that.” But that’s stuff that really gets me excited, and so any chance I get to talk with other people and ask them what solutions they use and how they’re doing it, and that type of thing.

(He goes on about how he prefers businesses that charge for their product, but then admits that Gist has never started charging, because he wants to be ubiquitous. At some point there needs to be an actual Business Model.