How Amazon gave Whrrl’s founder his startup inspiration

Jeff Holden

Jeff Holden might be an entrepreneur, but he has a big company to thank for his startup inspiration. It was during his 8 years working in Amazon.com’s Consumer Websites division that he became interested in the discovery experience, including the ‘people who bought X also bought Y’ feature. “One thing I was very focused on at Amazon was discovery,” he says. “Enabling customers to not only find things they are explicitly looking for, but serendipitously bump into compelling items they would never have known to look for.”

This kind of recommendation and discovery experience was only possible because of detailed data about the things people interacted with, for example the items they clicked on when they searched or the items they actually purchased – this data is referred to as a “clickstream.” Holden realized in 2005/2006 that there was no equivalent to a clickstream in the physical world – no way to say “people who go to this place X also go to place Y.” “Given the amount of value that has been unlocked on the Web utilizing clickstreams, from Google’s search relevancy ranking algorithm to keyword-based advertising to personalization technology, it made sense to me that huge amounts of value could similarly be found by enabling the real-world equivalent of clickstreams,” he says. “My belief was and is that we can fundamentally improve the way people interact with the physical world around them and increase the possibility of adventure and human connection.” He started Whrrl as a way to create real-life clickstreams, or what they call “footstreams.”

Whrrl is a social location-based game with a simple end goal: to get people out into the world trying new things. Users join Societies, which are interest groups around different topics, and earn Influence Points as they share their adventures and inspire others to try new things. The more points a user has the more Society Rewards they receive from merchants and brand partners. Users can link their profile to Facebook and Twitter, and can interact via the mobile site or through their free iPhone application.

Starting Whrrl four years ago was certainly a challenge. “In 2006, the idea of a footstream seemed ludicrous to pretty much everyone I talked to,” he says. “Of course, today, place-based social networking makes sense to most people, but four years makes a ton of difference in the world of technology.” He had to get people excited about the vision to recruit and raise money, and found people to work with on both fronts (the company is now backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bezos Expeditions, T-Venture, Trilogy Equity Partners and Reliance Technology Ventures). But the challenge of getting people behind his vision was “frankly easy” compared to the challenges found in the mobile ecosystem of the time. “Prior to the iPhone and App Store, getting a consumer product to market was an extremely high-risk and very expensive endeavor,” he says. “You worked with wireless carriers and ultimately had to have a contractual deal with them to make your product available to end users.” He says that just getting their attention was hard, let alone getting their approval – and on top of that once a deal was done you had to build your product for very limited and fragmented handsets. “You often couldn’t utilize all the various capabilities, like location technology, because the economics just didn’t make sense,” he says. “It took literally years from the first contact at the carrier to the product showing up on ‘the deck.’” Lucky for Holden and his team they were able to last into the iPhone era, and the game completely changed.

Holden has learned a lot along the way, and has four key pieces of advice for anyone just starting out. First, he says to use a minimum-viable-product methodology to get to market quickly. “That said, the ‘viable’ piece is critical -you have to create tangible and meaningful value for your customers with whatever you launch,” he says. Second, he advises being very experimental and analytical so you quickly learn what is working and what is not and can then rapidly iterate to double down on what is working and lock in the value. He also advises entrepreneurs to be frugal. “Spend money on things that truly matter and be hard core about not spending on anything else.” Finally, hire stars – people who make you better, people who you want to work with for a very long time. “You won’t win with mediocre people.”

Holden always comes back to the importance of execution, and says that while many startups have brilliant ideas, not many execute on them. “Execution in a startup is much more of an art form than in a big company, since everything is on a shoestring budget and there isn’t an army of people to assign to every little task,” he says. “Lots of startups get some set of ideas to the one-yard line, but never into the end zone. Their vision is not sufficiently realized that meaningful value is created and so they never get the momentum to build something important.”

It’s easy to see that the Whrrl team is committed to executing on their ideas – they released the latest version of their iPhone app in the spring, and recently announced their Society Rewards program in Las Vegas. Holden told GigaOM in August that the Whrrl iPhone app has 350,000 users and is adding 2,000 to 3,000 new users per day, on par with fellow location-based app Gowalla. Holden’s idea, once thought of as ludicrous, is now entering the mainstream – which isn’t a bad place for an entrepreneur to be.