Ankit Gupta talks about building Buzzwid, a video map app, with Evan Reyes during a summer internship. The app flopped at launch. The lesson: focus on solving actual user problems instead of chasing ideas that sound cool.
So the first one, this is an app that I worked on during my summer internship between my first and second year with a friend called Evan Reyes, who is currently the founder of Circle. And it was called Buzzwid. The idea was really, really simple. iPhone 3GS had just launched at that time. And the biggest change in the iPhone series was the ability to take videos. And so we were like, yeah, a lot of people would start taking videos because it's there. And what will they do with those videos, right? And so we were creating a platform where you can see all the videos that people are taking. And the goal was, oh, it'll be on a map where you'll see what's happening right now. People will be taking a lot of videos about some celebrity sighting or some restaurant that opened up. this is where things start going downhill. But you can see all these videos on a map and you'll be able to spot what's happening. And the business model was that an advertiser will be able to promote their product or service that someone has taken a video about, which we were hoping was quite frequent. That was not the case. This was the idea we tried, we had a lot of conversation, a lot of debate about it, it took us 2 months to launch. And eventually we did that and it failed. It got 200 downloads in the first day, it got 20 downloads in the second day, maybe like 2 the rest of the days that week, and then it really didn't get any downloads after that. And the biggest learning that I had from that was you need to focus on We just had an idea that people will take a lot of videos and want to see them on a map. That was just a cool idea. We didn't actually have a solution for something that's a problem that users were facing. And the big learning was that you need to focus on solutions, not ideas. All of us here are really creative, and we come up with loads of ideas throughout the day. We become really excited about that. I said, dude, we should start a company around that. But that's— when you actually go to the other side where you talk to— where you find out what someone actually— a problem that they have and solve that is when real value comes out.
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