splittr's posterous

Tonight we officially announce the death of From.Us, but our company lives on. We are moving on to something far removed from gifting.

The details of this decision are pretty mundane, but they boil down to three facts, none of which I will go into detail about. They are:

1. We weren't seeing the numbers we wanted to see as far as user retention and engagement.

2. I am bearish on the group gifting space.

3. We have enough runway (A.K.A. cash) to try something else out that we are really excited about.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us throughout this leg of our journey.

We're not quite ready to talk about our next project, but when we are I will post something to our Facebook wall.

From this day forward, the greatest gift giving solution ever -formerly known as Splittr- will be called From.Us. Bear with us as we set up the new domain, change logos, and implement our redesign.

If you already have a Splittr account, or a gift organized on Splittr, fear not. You will be able to access and do everything you desire, the same as before. The only difference will be instead of going to Splittr.com, you should go to From.Us. For now Splittr.com is still up and running but this will change over the next few days. 

Our reasons for the change are as follows:

1. Fom.Us is awesome.

2. People thought Splittr was spelled Splitter, and who can really blame them?

3. The focus of the site is no longer the simple act of splitting the cost of a gift. Rather the focus is on coming together to get a friend something great. Splittr=Splitting, From.Us=team love.

We hope you enjoy the new name as much as we do. We'll keep you posted of any more changes through the usual channels.

It was an exciting weekend for Splittr. Not only did we launch the new version, but also we were formally accepted into the 500 Startups Accelerator program. 

We join a batch of 21 other vicious startups including:

• AppGrooves — An iOS app that recommends other apps, promises to “fill the gap between Apple’s App Store and modern advanced EC sites such as Amazon and Netflix.”
• BugHerd — ”The world’s simplest bug tracker for web designers and developers.”
• Cardinal Blue — “Building a better way for people to work together in real-time using photos and chat.”
• Culture Kitchen — “Connects lower-income immigrant women skilled in cooking authentic, ethnic cuisines with food lovers who want to learn this craft and the story behind food.”
• Daily Aisle — A site where brides can find and book wedding vendors.
• Hello World — “Simple profiles for developers.”
• Kibin — “Kibin users will give you unbiased feedback on essays, resumes, or breakup notes.” (we sit across from these guys).
• LaunchBit — “Builds tools to help new web entrepreneurs do customer development.”
• Launchrock — “A viral launch platform offering analytics as a premium.”
• OVIA — A video interview application “to provide a more human approach to finding the best talent.”
• Scoopola — “Scoopola is the HotelTonight for live music and theater.”
• Snapette — Finding and sharing fashion on your phone.
• StoryTree — “Brings families and loved ones closer together by capturing and sharing the stories that matter.”
• Tout — “Canned responses on steroids with analytics.”
• Vayable — “A marketplace for things to do on vacation.”
• VidCaster — An easy way to create a video site on your own domain.
• Volta — A tool to track and test the effective of outbound phone calls.
• Vvall — “Helps you complete your memories by collecting moments captured by friends.”
• Welcu — “Complete control of your event planning.”
• Zerply — “A non-corporate LinkedIn, built for the generation who has grown up with the web.”

We are ridiculously pumped to become members of the 500 Family, and can't wait to start getting feedback on the new product.

Launching a new product is kind of like seeing how far you can swim under water...in the dark. You don't really know where you are or how far you've gone until you surface. Put differently, products hurt a lot to build, and you are never really sure how good they are until you unleash them onto the market.

It follows that the moment before launch is similar to the moment before you surface. Its dark, so you don't quite no where the water ends, but you know its getting close. Your lungs tingle at the thought of breathing in some air. Even some of the greatest office space in Silicon Valley can start to seem pretty clastrophobic after enough programming and sleep deprevation. To further add to the brevity of the situation, our AC does not turn on during the weekend, which literally makes it hard to breath.

I suppose where my analogy goes awry is that the excitement and chaos you associate with the moment before you break through the surface, is usually not accompanied by nausea inducing fear. There are a million things that will go wrong with any product launch, which usually results in a whole lot of flailing and tredding on the entreprenuer's part as he tries to figure out where the hell he is. The servers stop running, the site gets hacked, customers don't actually understand your product, and around 999,997 more that you can read about all over the internet. This is scary. So scary that most startups have trouble pulling the trigger, even an inch away from breaking through.

But Splittr's gotta breathe, even if we flail and go back under.

It took us around 3 and a half months to create the first Splittr. During that time we wrote 25,000 lines of code. It has been around 2 and a half weeks since we decided to launch a completely different product. Since then we have produced around 20,000 lines of code. We have built a product that I think is easier to use, and a whole lot more fun (mostly because of the 500 Startups Team and Splittr Designer Extraordinaire Daniel Hirunrusme).

But that just what I think. User testing aside, this is pure speculation. In the interest of totally exhausting this analogy, allow me to explain what we do know for certain. 20,000 lines of code does not indicate an awesome product. It shows that we have been kicking a hell of lot harder than we did the first time, and I am excited to see how far we've come when we surface.

We started this journey by addressing the economic problems of gifting. This seemed like a logical choice to a student of economics...until we actually started talking to users.

In my first post I mentioned the fact that people see value in gifts beyond the physical item. I said that the ability to "wrap" a suggested gift would suggest this, but frankly its just not that great of a solution (duh). We fundamentaly undervalued the amount of effort that someone puts in to getting a gift, and the context in which it is given. 

We also didn't take in to account the fact that often people don't know what they want for a specific event, and those that do often don't feel comfortable even hinting at what that may be. Our system was set up with the premise that the recipient would need to take the initiative and post his gifts. For some things this makes sense (wedding showers, baby showers, etc.), but the improvements Splittr makes to wedding registries will likely be copied swiftly, and are not that innovative.

And so, we have decided to take a new approach. Our new product will let friends and family pitch in towards a list of gifts (created by the givers), and then lets the recipient choose from a list of gifts. You can still sign in to the old Splittr if you wish, but we have stopped signing up new people.

I encourage you to join our Launchrock list to get updates on how the new product is going. As always thanks for listening.

Eric

In my last post I talked about the hugely ugly schmorgesborg that is the gifting market today. This post is meant to give you a little insight into how we think about solving the problems that exist, and in a small sense the world in general.

Gifting is Social, Now the web is too.

It is socially acceptable for me to post on an old friend’s wall to tell him happy birthday. Ten years ago this action did not even exist. This isn’t just a new way to communicate-the text on your wall doesn’t look too different from the text on your email- this is a completely new type of social interaction. This does not mean that the next logical step is to make gifting a social action online, but it does open the door for all sorts of “social innovations”.

Social Innovation?

You should be able to comment on gifts people give each other, suggest gifts online, and suggest wrapped gifts online. Now you can with Splittr. We think this is innovative.

Social Networks add efficiency and clarity to the complexity of real life.

Caveat: when they are built well. Its not clear what I should do for my old acquaintance’s birthday. I certainly don’t know him well enough to buy him a huge gift, but I do want to show him that I care enough about him to do more than just post on his wall. Splittr fills this gray area. Contribute what you feel comfortable with, nothing more, nothing less. And if you don’t want them to know how much you are contributing, Splittr will hide the amount.

Also, Splittr specifically addresses the problems with gifting by allowing for the gift recipient to have control over what she gets. If you are adament about surprising the recipient you can still suggest a “wrapped” gift, and she won’t know what the gift is until its been purchased by Splittr.  

We hope you like it, but its cool if you don’t.

 The bottom line is that we have made a really cool product. We think Splittr will make you a hero in your giftees’ eyes, and get you some awesome gifts as well. But, this is a new way of giving gifts, and we won’t know if our “cool” product is actually that great unless we hear what you love and hate about the product.

My email is eric@splittr.com. If I don’t hear from you I will be disappointed.

Our name is narrow. Splittr does let you split the cost of a gift online, but it allows you to do significantly more. In these next two posts I will drop a whole slew of jargon explaining how I think Splittr will help make the world a more efficient place. The first post will focus on our economy/society as is, and the second will detail how I think Splittr's integration into our social graphs can solve this problem.

Gift giving has some pretty obvious problems, and some pretty great benefits. Joel Waldfogel estimates that every year the holiday season produces around $12 billion of waste (waste is the difference between what givers paid for the gifts and what recipients would pay to buy themselves the item). Three things cause this to happen. Trivial or obvious as they may seem, all deserve some attention and a fresh approach.

First, gift givers don't neccesarily know what the recipients want. In economics terms this causes a market failure due to asynchronus information. My grandma probably doesn't know that I want a video game instead of a book on the history of India (although my grandma is pretty cool and I do think India is cool). My grandma will likely be waisting her money in this scenario.

Second, the gift giving market is incomplete. This means that sometimes the recipient would prefer one gift whose total cost is less than or equal to the combined cost of all the gifts he recieves. I would much prefer one $40 iPhone case to two $20 Abraham Lincoln Bobble Heads. My friends could be giving me more value the same exact amount of money, but they are not because of the third problem: coordination.

Gift givers should be able to seemlessly combine their contributions to maximize the value the recipient recieves. Its hard for my friends to figure out how to collect money and deliver me one gift, so they all get me a seperate item that I don't really want.

Combine these three issues, and you get a whole lot of waste. 

What we are not taking into account are the awesome parts of giving and getting a gift. (I probably made my friends feel pretty good by smiling and thanking them for a 30 rack of keystone). As a teaser for my next post I will postulate that the reason no group gifting tartup is epically huge is that no one has figured out how to fix all these problems without diminishing from the good parts of gifting.

splittr is currently in development.