It's been crunch time for the past few weeks at my startup - Jangl. We've been working on something that I truly believe is game-changing. Here's the deal... when Ben and I started Jangl, we had some big ideas in mind. There would be an organic progression for how and when those ideas mature as services people adopt. We started with a focus on privacy, because we believed privacy was the first inflection of bridging people's web relationships to their phones. So we did private, disposable phone numbers, provisioned by Jangl IDs and widgets. Next stop was to move from IDs to other 'already-in-use' people identifiers. Here's a diagram we put together in December 2005, just after we had closed our first funding:
We were still using our stealth name at the time "Buzzage". Notice the license plate as a potential means for provisioning a Jangl number. We were only half kidding.
The working premise is that you cannot truly make phone numbers behave like email and IM addresses, until the privacy thing is solved. So now that we've got this web-to-phone privacy thing figured out, it's time to migrate to the next inflection of our vision. There were lots of ways to skin the cat. We could have gone a route that says 'give people private numbers to use whenever/however, and then build personalization based services to apply to those contextual phone number personas. We could have found ourselves looking more like GrandCentral and RingCentral had we gone that route. It's all good, but not what we're here for.
Ben and I needed to put our heads back together and hone in on a theme for our next several releases. The prerequisites:
1. The theme must be an enabler for something yet even bigger.
2. It must take what we've built, incorporate it into something new that is more universal.
3. It must be simple and free (with great, logical placements of revenue generating extensions).
4. It must have legs to huge adoption.
5. It must give people what they want today, but also give them new wow functions.
6. It must spread virally (duh).
7. It must be game-changing. (something nobody has seen, that everybody could use)
You might be thinking about now... "ok, right, yeah, uh huh." Stay with me a sec.
So Ben and I went to lunch, and we also grabbed Aaron our VP of marketing (who by the way joined us from Podshow a few months back). We talked about product as-is, things we need to improve, etc. I was itching to spark a bigger discussion though. In my car driving back from lunch, I said "Ok guys, take all your predispositions, thoughts, inclinations and throw them out the window right now. Think game-changing. Don't stop at any hurdles. Then we got back to my office, hat shots of patron and got going. There was some scratch on my whiteboard to prove that session.
(Most of it won't make sense, but then again I wouldn't want it to make sense). What is it? I can't say because I'm under our own press embargo;). The first step in our next theme will show its face tomorrow. I hope you and millions of others like it.
-MC
WOW!! What an innovative concept this is!! This has so much to offer the hundreds of thousands of new relationships springing up in worlds like Second Life. Removing that physical identity associated with a telephone number is so simple, yet so refreshing. I think I might just subscribe!
Posted by: Jonathan | May 22, 2007 at 04:27 AM