If you like this interview, you can submit it to my favorite news site. –Andrew

I invited Dennis Crowley to Mixergy because I think he sees the future and then invents it.

After he and his friends lost their jobs, he co-founded Dodgeball as way for them to tell each other where they were so they could meet in person. Back in the days before everyone had a smartphone he found a way to make it work. It was ahead of its time, which is why Google bought it. But Google let the project die.

That’s when Dennis struck back and created foursquare. Not only are early adopters crazy for this mobile app that helps them find their friends, but as you’ll hear in this interview, it’s getting enough interest from local businesses that foursquare might end up building the holy grail of local advertising: an ad network that will show you coupons for local business as you’re walking past them.

This technology is still in its early days, but I asked Dennis to talk about how the idea evolved and why it’s finally starting to catch on.

The FULL program

About Dennis Crowley

Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of foursquare (with Naveen Selvadurai), a service that mixes social, local and gaming elements to encourage people explore the cities in which they live. Previously, Dennis founded dodgeball.com (with Alex Rainert), one of the first mobile social services in the US, which was acquired by Google in 2005. You should say “hi” to him on Twitter.

Notable points from this program

- The original idea for Dodgeball, foursquare’s predecessor, was to create a smarter city guide similar to Yelp.

- Dennis says going to NYU’s ITP program helped sharpen his startup’s ideas. Here’s an excerpt:

[Dodgeball] was very difficult to explain to people. It was mobile, it was social, I mean you needed a friend’s list, which no one was doing at the time. So it didn’t really gain any traction. It didn’t pick up traction until around 2003 / 2004 when I was at ITP, this grad program at NYU, with my buddy Alex. We were able to re-invent some of the Dodgeball stuff in the context of “Hey it’s like Friendster but for cell phones.” And once we started doing that, people got it and we were able to reach a wider audience.

- Dennis and his friends bought the domain name Dodgeball.com, but he got to keep it because he paid the hosting fees.

[Dodgeball.com] was it was a domain name that me and some buddies from college bought back in 1998 and we used to use it just as our personal blog like to post stories of ourselves. And then I started working on this city guide stuff and I just let those guys know well I was going to use the name for this other product and we will all get our own other domain names by then.

- At first, their idea was socially awkward, so they tested it.

That’s what a lot of our work at NYU was about, seeing if we convinced a 1000 people to tell us where they are on Friday night, does that make Friday more interesting? Or does that make it more awkward? Or like how does that whole thing work out? And that was a lot of what Alex and I were trying to do with our thesis there.

- They felt they had to sell their company to Google because they weren’t connected enough to raise money to keep it going.

I think it’s like, we weren’t plugged in as much.  We didn’t have any reputation for doing anything.  We had never run companies.  We had both been laid off from other companies. We came from this really weird program at NYU that no one knew about.  Who’s going to trust us with that check?  I mean, I don’t blame them.  It’s wasn’t like they were handing it to us and we’re like, no no no no no.  We would go in there and be like, yeah, we like big checks, and you guys aren’t ready for big checks.  So, Google thing was a good opportunity to continue to work on Dodgeball, but kind of do it on someone else’s dime.

- He co-founded foursquare because Google shut down Dodgeball.

It was two of us [Dennis and foursquare co-founder Naveen] for I do not know if it’s like five months or so.  So, you know, he was working on front end side and I was on working on the back-end side and the website site.

- Since social networks tend to suck until users have a lot of friends, Dennis and Naveen added game elements to make foursquare fun for single users too.

We knew it was going to take a while to get people migrated over.  So we started building some game mechanics that will make it fun if you don’t have lot of friends and it turned out that the game mechanics were really sticking and people really enjoying it.  You know, trying to get points and trying to get badges.  So we started refining some of that and giving some more thought to how we can make this kind of fun one player experience

- One of the issues foursquare is tackling now is cheaters. People are so eager to earn badges that they’re using the app to check in to more places than they actually visit.

- foursquare could end up building a powerful local ad network that will let you see a coupon for a local business as you walk past it.

We’ve got an API that people are starting to use right now.  It’s not public but it’s a bunch of people using the private beta.  [Other companies are] using it to build apps that are like foursquare; that when you check in somewhere something happens.  And every time someone uses the Foursquare API to check in we send down some coupon data.  You can display it if you want to.  You don’t have to display it.

The way we think about it is like the promos that we do within the app should be so great that if you don’t get them you’re disappointed.  You’re like, “But I want to get the offer for the free chicken sandwich because I’ve been here ten times.”  And you feel kind of naked without it.  So yeah, we’re hustling to make sure we get the right types of venues, the right types of offers.

The transcript

This transcript is edited by people like you, so if you see a mistake, edit it.

Full program includes

- As you listen to this interview you’ll pick up on Dennis’s motivation as an entrepreneur. I think you’ll relate to his desire to show that his idea will work.

- Dennis talks about why his sale to Google didn’t work out as he planned and the one thing that might have helped.

- You’ll see how an innovative idea develops into a business. We spent a lot of time on that.

Suggested comments

- What did I miss in this interview?

- Do you think foursquare could create a location-based mobile ad network? How big could this be for them?

- I’m anxious for some more feedback on my ad for Haystack. What do you think?