(This is a more personal variation of my post on the Shizzow blog: Shizzow!)
Over the past 10 months, I've been working on a location-based social web service startup called Shizzow with Sam Keen, Mark Wallaert and Dawn Foster. Today we're finally releasing it into private beta for a select group of Portlanders.
Let me backtrack a bit and talk about how Shizzow came to be. Throughout 2007 I found myself in countless conversations about online social networks, and the recurring theme was that the number of friends that you had was supposed to serve as some sort of an barometer of how important you were or what your status was. My argument over and over again was that friendships, as most things in life, should never be about quantity, but should always be about quality.
Mark came up to me last September and said, "So, I've got this idea..." He pitched the idea of building a web service that would automatically notify you of your friends' current locations, to enable you to easily meet up with people for a cup of coffee, drinks at happy hour, etc. At the risk of sounding cliché, when he said this I felt a chill up my spine and goosebumps raised on my arms. This is what I'd been hoping that Twitter or Facebook or any of the countless others would provide - a way to make it easier connect face-to-face with the local people that I truly cared about.
In early October 2007, Mark and I began development, and brought Sam on board soon thereafter to connect our service to external APIs to smooth out some of our rough edges. Around November 2007 we chose the name Shizzow, partially because it was one of few domain names available, but more importantly because stating it elicits a state of pure excitement - that same excitement that you feel when you spontaneously gather with friends. Then in July 2008 we asked Dawn to join us to help interface with the Shizzow community.
It's been a harrowing year of 80-hour work weeks (each of us has a full-time job outside of Shizzow), and we've seen a few competitors enter the marketplace before us. But throughout this time we've endured because of our belief in building a service that will help us connect with friends, and by remaining focused on our 3 core tenets: Simplicity, Community and Trust.
Finally, we're ready to release Shizzow to you, with the hopes that Shizzow will connect with your friends and increase the quality of your life.
Shizzow!
- Ryan
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