A veteran brand manager for PepsiCo, where he led the vast Quaker Oats and Aunt Jemima brands through a series of successful product launches, Josh Jacobson left the corporate world in 2011 for a crash course in entrepreneurship. Having gone through the rigorous Startupbootcamp (SBC) three-month program in Berlin, Germany, Jacobson is now in the final phases of launching the world’s first fully-featured website exclusively for making new friends, ItsPlatonic, from his headquarters in New York City. The site is slated for a public launch in January 2014.
We spoke with Jacobson about the excitement of delivering a much-needed and anticipated site to the web and the joys and pitfalls of striking off on your own from a corporate structure.
How did you get the idea for an online friendship site?
I grew up in Denver and I went to college at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. My first job was in Chicago, and I didn’t have any friends from either Dartmouth or Denver moving there with me. I was the youngest person at my job by ten years, so I moved to a huge city with lots of young professionals, but I didn’t know anybody going in and I didn’t really have any built-in ways to meet people. That’s where the seed of the idea came from. I was familiar with online dating so I was kind of shocked when I Googled “online friendship site” and nothing came up. The more I talked about it and the more I thought about it, there were tons of people who had used several services that really aren’t meant to help you make friends, and because they’re not meant for that, they don’t succeed.
Why did you make the decision to become a full-time entrepreneur?
I actually knew nothing about tech when I graduated college, but when I was working for Pepsi as a brand manager, my very first assignment was to lead all kinds of digital executions for Quaker Oats. Doing that, not only did I work in technology, but I ended up working at Google’s office a few days a week. One of the things they were working on at the time was Google Wave, which was a startup within Google. I ended up launching one of the very fist applications for that on behalf of Quaker, and just had a lot of exposure to the startup scene. They flew me to Google IO, I spoke about new technologies and business to a lot of people at the headquarters, and I just got really into the scene.
The other thing would be what almost every other entrepreneur has experienced. In the corporate world, you are often not rewarded proportionally for your efforts, and that can be particularly frustrating if you’re a standout performer. I had some things at PepsiCo that went extremely well that I didn’t feel were appropriately recognized, so for me, it was really why should I work for somebody else when the result of my efforts can directly affect my life rather than directly affect a corporate entity.
What were the first steps you took to realize your vision?
The very first thing I did was I recruited my co-founder. Scott was my best friend growing up, and I flew to Denver and gave him a hard sell about why he had to quit his job and join me in starting this company. After about five days of talking to him about it constantly, he made the decision; two weeks later, he had quit his job. From there, we began figuring out what form this would take. We went on Craigslist, where there’s a section called “Strictly Platonic”; it’s actually the third most popular section on Craigslist in terms of personals, and we started messaging people. We said, “We’re just looking to help people make friends, how’s your Craigslist experience, and if somebody were to build a service for this, what would you want to see?” and we got such encouraging results: people wanting to pay us, people wanting to sign up right then, and we hadn’t even built anything.
What has the process of developing your site been?
I’d say we’ve gone through three phases: the very first was sitting in a very small apartment in a poor suburb of Denver that we could barely afford, just working on building the site. My co-founder was working on the programming and I was working on what the site was going to look like, putting together designs to create an awesome user experience, testing them, things like that. The second phase was applying for and then attending Startupbootcamp. We moved from Denver to Berlin and we attended Startupbootcamp’s startup accelerator, which completely changed the trajectory of our business. I probably gained more skills there that are directly applicable to ItsPlatonic than I did in either college or at work at Pepsi. Beyond all the skills, the people we met and the network we grew were invaluable. We also raised money from a pair of angel investors while we were there. So that in and of itself gave us the financial support we needed to successfully launch and build out our team.
After Startupbootcamp, we looked at every city in the world and we thought about where we should launch ItsPlatonic. We actually didn’t have any ties to New York, but we decided this was the place: given the number of dating and meeting sites based here, Meetup, for instance, and also the easy access to Europe, where all of our investors and advisors are based.
Where are you with your project now?
We’ve had a very small number of users on the site, since about May. We’re being very deliberate about making sure that we’re answering user feedback. When we first brought users on the site, there was a lot of pushback about different areas, so we hesitated about bringing more users on until we were able to fix those things and really make it an experience that everybody will love. Starting at the end of this month, we’re going to onboard more users. We have a waiting list of about 2,000 people who requested sign-up through our website, which we’ve done absolutely nothing to try to build: that just happened organically. Our goal is to let all 2,000 of those people on during the rest of the fall and winter, and then we’ll have a real public launch in January. In January, we’ll start proactively telling people that ItsPlatonic is live, free, and open to the public.
What have been common themes in user feedback?
People really want something that feels very familiar. The more we make it feel like other websites that people have used, the better they like the experience and the easier it is for them to get around. The second thing is that they really want us to push people to meet in person. Because this is a friendship site, lots of people want to make friends, but they may not have quite as much motivation as they would have if they were searching for a romantic partner. Instead of messaging back and forth, like dating sites – on average, a couple looking for romance messages back and forth over forty times before they meet in person – we have focused the site around activities. We have this breakthrough activity planner that really makes planning a hang out seamless. You can schedule everything and have a place to meet in just one message, and we structure that whole message for you. That’s received really positive feedback.
How have these users found you on the web?
Everybody who has found us has found us through word of mouth or because they searched something that located our landing page; these are people searching “how to find a tennis partner” or climbing buddy or things like that. We haven’t proactively advertised whatsoever. Just about everybody agrees that the audience is there. People have been trying to build the friendship site for years and years. I actually know a company that tried to build it in the mid-nineties. And nobody’s been successful. So really, our idea is if we have the right product, if we have something that solves the friendship dilemma, then users will find our site. So we don’t need to actively recruit users at this point since all we need to establish is a base. Because our product is so strong, those people will tell their friends, and we’ll become known as the go-to friendship site.
Why have those other attempts failed and what do you do differently?
There are a few things, with the biggest one being that we really understand friendship. That comes from spending two years in Chicago trying every possible way to make friends. I read a book about a woman also in Chicago, who did the same thing: she went on fifty-two friend dates in fifty-two weeks. Through this experience, we learned exactly what does and doesn’t work.
So many people have tried to be cute about it. For example, OkCupid had a friendship finder that they just ended up closing, and it was based on doing survey questions. There’s so many people trying to be gimmicky about it and instead all the web really needs is a product that takes friendship seriously, is centered around activites, builds a site that’s 100% focused on friendship, and provides all the features that people need.
What were the top takeaways from Startupbootcamp, and how have you applied them to your business?
So much of the value of Startupbootcamp was getting to go really in-depth on important questions surrounding ItsPlatonic with experienced CEOs. The biggest takeaway was the power of networking and just how much knowing people can help you. I went into this without any sort of network whatsoever, I was never in the startup world, and now I can get an introduction to just about anybody I want to get in touch with. I’ve spoken on the phone with some of my personal heroes. Not only that, but they give phenomenal advice; they’re people who had built these websites that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet they love taking the time to talk to you and really dig in to your product and give you all the help they can. The lessons I’ve learned from other entrepreneurs have been astounding.
What was a challenge you faced in getting momentum behind your site launch?
We’ve faced a number of challenges, starting with location. We’ve been given a lot of opportunities because we have been based in Denver, New York, Berlin, and even London, but at the same time it becomes difficult; there’s a number of investors in London who think we live there and will email me saying, “Hey, can you meet next week? We’re interested in going over this thing that you sent out in your update,” and I have to remind them that I’m based in New York now. So, one thing we learned is there is definitely a value to staying in one location and getting to know people on a longer time scale.
The second thing is we underestimated the difficulty of development for a site that is made to scale and made to be successful. We really underestimated the work that goes into that, and also underestimated how finished it needed to be when we first brought users on in May. They said, “If I’m going to be meeting new people through this, then the technology needs to be absolutely foolproof, 100% secure,” and by the end of this month it will be, but at the time it was lacking.
Do you have a marketing plan in place for when you launch your site?
With PepsiCo I was focused on marketing, and my belief in that ability is what gives me the confidence that this will be successful. Our marketing is going to be pretty different from what people are accustomed to. . . some very unique and exciting executions to look forward to. We’ve already done a bit of it – in the three months we were in Berlin, we were in over fifteen periodicals, and a lot of them were for some pretty offbeat stuff. We found a tie-in for the presidential election, I was compared to Jerry Maguire in an article, and that’s the type of thing we love. Advertising should be really fun, and it’s most effective when you’re doing something nobody else is doing.
What advice would you give a fellow entrepreneur or business owner?
Do something that you really believe in and love. The thing that really keeps me going is every time I talk to people, they are excited for the site, especially people I never expected, ones who are extremely social but just don’t have as robust a social life as they desire. They wish they had friends for tennis or they wish they had friends for something else, so knowing that my site is going to help make people happier has helped enormously, both for personal motivation and for motivating other people – we get people applying for jobs that don’t even exist yet, because they love the idea. We’ve had investors reach out to us just because they want there to be a friendship site.
Beyond that, I’d say think of startups as an industry. A lot of people come from companies and from corporate America, and they think of startups as more of this unknown thing that you have to figure out yourself and that every startup is different, and I disagree with that. I think that startups are an industry; once you get to know them, once you figure out how they operate, once you know this world, you gain industry knowledge that’s really invaluable. It took me a long time to treat startups that way, but it’s been really helpful.
How are you feeling with just a few months to go before launch?
The next four months are going to be the most exciting ones of my life. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. I went into this thinking I wanted to start a website, but now I know I want to help bring friendship to the world, but also I know that startups are my life, and for me, this is the only way to live. No matter how it all turns out, no matter what happens tomorrow or next year, it’s something that I’ll never regret.
You can follow the latest news on ItsPlatonic on their blog.