“Our goal is to make it easy for any company, community, or brand to launch their own social check-in application.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

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Lawrence Coburn is the CEO and co-founder of DoubleDutch.  Lawrence has been heavily involved in social media and entrepreneurship since early 1999. Lawrence is a frequent public speaker on the topics of Geolocation, User Generated Content, Search Engine Optimization, and Social Media Distribution, and has founded, mentored, and consulted with numerous Internet start-ups. Lawrence holds a BA from Georgetown University, and an MBA from the Goizueta Business School of Emory University. He also blogs at The Next Web as one of the founding editors of the Geolocation blog.

DoubleDutch, based in San Francisco, helps any company or community build their own mobile, geosocial service.   DoubleDutch launched in March, 2010 at the SXSW Interactive Festival and was named “Best Mobile Startup” at the Paypal X Startup Rally.

MO:
DoubleDutch has been called “Foursquare for the Enterprise” and “Ning for Mobile Social Networks.”  Describe what the application does.

Lawrence:
Our goal is to make it easy for any company, community, or brand to launch their own social check-in application.  Specifically our platform does three things: it allows our customers to 1) Customize the brand / look & feel of the app; 2) customize their own game mechanics (e.g. the behaviors that earn badges or points); and 3) define their universe of venues (e.g. show only bars?  only tennis courts?  etc.).

MO:
DoubleDutch is different from other geolocation apps in that you allow groups to customize the app and brand it to fit their business.  What advantages does that give businesses?

Lawrence:
I think there are a couple of major advantages such as privacy, relevance, and control.  Due to its tie in with the real world, geolocation brings with it some very really privacy concerns.  One of our clients, Arizona State University, is configuring the app so that you need to have an ASU email address to access the service – this adds an additional security layer that you’re unable to get with public networks like Foursquare or Facebook.  In terms of relevance, our tradeshow clients appreciate that the activity stream (check-ins, photos, reviews, etc.) generated by the app are all relevant to their events – attendees of the show don’t have to sift through irrelevant check-ins and activities from friends not associated with the conference.  And finally, the control we offer our clients is a big deal.  To give a very simple example, many of the game mechanics on Foursquare are related to urban nightlife, such as the Crunked badge.  These are a lot of fun for a certain demographic, but aren’t as relevant for say, the parents of young children.  With DoubleDutch, you can control exactly what behaviors result in what rewards, allowing you to tailor the experience towards your user base.

MO:
Can you give some example of how the app is being utilized today?  Who are some of your clients and how are they using the app?

Lawrence:
We think that there are almost unlimited uses for our app.  Since launch, we have been getting the most demand from a couple of key verticals: conferences / tradeshows, universities, the hospitality industry, and local media companies looking to take their local editorial content mobile.  All of these are great use cases.  Clients include GQ, Gannett, Arizona State, Collinson Media, and more.  You can check out some use cases and case studies on our site (www.doubledutch.me).

MO:
Is the business world ready for an enterprise version of this product?  I heard you speak of a real estate company that had ideas for the application of DoubleDutch that you hadn’t even considered, so it sounds like business is ready.  But what is your perspective, are you ahead of your time or are we ready to adopt this concept now?

Lawrence:
Most of our initial demand is on the “B2B2C” side – large, local communities that wish deliver geosocial functionality under their own brand.  But I think you raise an interesting point around a larger trend, something we call the consumerization of the enterprise.  Technologies that get legs in the consumer space will eventually find their way to the enterprise campus.  We’ve seen this with services like social networking (see Salesforce Chatter), status updates (see Yammer), and even video (see BrightCove).  I have no doubt that geosocial will follow the same path, and we’ll be here when the market is ready.

MO:
You’re clearly among the most knowledgeable and innovative when it comes to social media.  What do you think the role of social media and social networking will be in defining what the internet evolves into over the next 5 to 10 years?  Why is it important for entrepreneurs to stay close to these changes?

Lawrence:
If search has dominated the first commercial phase of the Internet, social certainly seems poised to dominate the second.  Facebook is an absolute juggernaut that is reaching more than half a billion people a month.  Twitter is doubling every year.  Groupon, the social buying service, was just called by Forbes the “fastest growing company in history.”  As more people get online, and get comfortable publishing, social media is only going to get more important.  Communities that are able to get to critical mass of participants are able to wield tremendous economic and social clout – even a service like Yelp, which is nowhere near Facebook or Twitter’s reach, is changing the local business landscape.  Google’s recent acquisitions show that they are desperate to do a better job with social media, as they recognize the power shift that is happening.  And location / mobile will be the next big frontier.

And for every big wave of innovation that hits our industry, there are many opportunities for startups and entrepreneurs to solve problems and create meaningful businesses.   That’s why I try and read as much as I can and stay a step ahead.

MO:
How difficult is it to start a web based company? Do you think it’s easier or more difficult than most people think?

Lawrence:
I started my first online company in 1999.  It was hard, and very expensive to get up and running.  I think we spent $120K just to get the site online.

This is not the case today.  Bandwidth, engineering, and software costs have come way down, and this has had profound implications on the entire industry, from offshore employment markets, to big company retention plans, to the venture capital landscape.

But while it’s not hard to get something started, it is very hard to get traction.  The social media landscape is littered with cool little tools that would be awesome if only people used them.  And it’s almost impossible to know what consumer facing service is going to capture the imagination of consumers.  For example, Chatroulette pulled it off, Google Wave did not.

My best advice in this area is to find people with different skills than your own, and try and solve problems that you personally care about.  An excellent community resource for trials and tribulations associated with startup life is Hacker News.