bjbj< Brandon Schauer: So, now we move onto the fast paced portion of our afternoon where
we re going to be talking to five different leaders of user experience, first starting
off with Alexa Andrzejewski. She is founder and CEO of Foodspotting, a visual guide for
good food and where to find it. I think she can probably quickly tell us about the differences
about her service, along with telling us the tale of her service. Her ten minutes might
be a little bit more interactive. We ll see where she and you as the audience want to
take it, but I think she shows how a simple visual a simple vision can help create these
kind of full platforms that John s talking about, and the teams can form and become really
successful with a very simple vision. So, she s gonna share what she has learned, and
that being that picturing something clearly can help make it happen. Alexa. Alexa Andrzejewski:
Thank you. Hey everyone, I m Alexa Andrzejewski. I guess I won t stand back there and hide
from you all. And I m the founder and CEO of Foodspotting. Before that, I was actually
a user experience designer for Adaptive Path. So, Foodspotting, like Brandon was saying,
is an iPhone app, Android app and website that lets you find good food more easily by
letting you find and recommend specific dishes instead of just restaurants, and it s an idea
that I came up with about two years ago while I was still at Adaptive Path when I realized
there were a lot of restaurant review sites, but nothing for rating specific dishes, and
I thought if you re looking for a specific dish, how can you go out and find it? And
so our big vision is to cover the earth with sightings of good food and catalog all of
the good food and where to find it and then show that to you guys through our apps. So,
when working on Foodspotting and having come from a consulting background, one of the most
amazing surprises was this newfound power that I had, which was to basically be able
to articulate an idea and have my team make it real immediately sometimes. So, I realized
that I would tell my cofounder, who is the technical guy, I really wish the profile could
be more like a blog. In an hour he d create it. And being in consulting, the gap between
designing something and seeing it come to life is a lot longer, and so this newfound
power was really refreshing and I started to realize if I could picture something, my
team could make it real. But with this great power comes great responsibility because the
opposite is also true. Some of the things that have come out the most half baked at
Foodspotting have been the things that I haven t articulated concretely. For example, I ve
been telling my team since the beginning like, Why don t we have more Facebook integration?
but I m not giving them specific directives for what I was looking for and not taking
the time to research the platform and give specific direction, and so today we still
don t have Facebook connect for logging into our site, which I ve been wishing we ve had
for awhile, so that opposite is also true. But the best things that have happened to
Foodspotting and all of our greatest successes have come when I was able to come up with
a concrete idea and articulate it in a way that was memorable and simple and straightforward.
Even Foodspotting itself actually began with this vision. Since I was at Adaptive Path
and I was an interaction designer, I couldn t go out and just build my idea, so instead
I had about six months where it was just me thinking about the idea, refining it, talking
to people, sharing it and getting feedback. And the very first thing that I did to articulate
my idea was to put together this one page poster, so before I made mockups of the idea
for the iPhone app, before I made any wireframes, I created this one page poster that summarized
this idea that had been rolling around in my head for a couple of months. You know,
it begins with this tagline, the name and the elevator pitch, all of which help kind
of communicate what it does. It lists some of the characteristics, like Foodspotting
will be like a scavenger hunt for food, or being able to stumble upon good food wherever
you go, or a food radar, and it captures some of the key benefits of using Foodspotting
to the user in these sketches, which don t show interfaces, but just show the experience.
It s like having a food passport so you can keep track of the things you ve tried. It
s like radar for food. And this poster is what I used to eventually find a cofounder
someone who got the vision and was just like, Wow, I ve never seen a vision that was so
clearly articulated. I want to be a part of this. eventually to build up a team re now
six people fulltime and eventually raise money for the idea. And it all began with this poster.
ve also been able to establish some amazing partnerships through vision. One of the magazines
in San Francisco, 7x7, annually publishes a list of 100 things to try before you die.
This list was really popular in past years. You know, people would print out this list
and check off the 100 things and compete with their friends informally. So, our very first
partnership was actually a cold call. I went up to this magazine and said, Hey, I love
your list. Imagine if there was a citywide photo scavenger hunt around your list powered
by Foodspotting. The idea resonated with them of course because they d already seen this
behavior, and within a month we actually launched with 7x7 as our launch partner. And as for
the 7x7 100 food scavenger hunt, some guy completed it in the first month. All 100 foods
from scratch. So, we then moved on to bigger things and we actually brought on a head of
partnership, Soraya, who s in New York, and when I brought her on, one of the first things
I said to her is, My dream partnership is to have Anthony Bourdain from the Travel Channel
s content on Foodspotting. I said, Wouldn t it be great if you could launch Foodspotting
and not just see recommendations from the crowd, but you could see what Anthony Bourdain
has eaten near you? Cause I know he s eaten at places in the city and I never know where
they are and I always want to know. So, with that simple directive, Soraya, who knows a
lot of people in New York, but didn t know anyone at the Travel Channel, immediately
went out and made some connections and was having dinner with the president of the Travel
Channel that week. So, just by giving her that concrete directive, she was able to go
out and make it real really quickly. And having a concrete vision also helped me attract these
people in the first place these amazing cofounders of mine who are able to make things real so
quickly. Foodspotting grew up alongside of other location based services like Four Square,
and so we d kind of been watching Four Square and how they d gone about doing things. I
m starting to see Time Square ads for Four Square for example sponsored by Gap and all
of these interesting partnerships. And we learned that the guy behind that is this guy
Tristan who is their kind of rock star business development guy. And so when I went out to
look for a third cofounder, I knew I wanted someone like Tristan, and so I would even
tell people in cocktail parties, Yeah, we re looking for a business development person.
We re basically looking for our Tristan. And it can sound like a lazy shortcut to describing
what you want, but it described enough that somebody could say, Oh, I know a Tristan.
You should totally talk to this person. And just by having that one person that kind of
encapsulated what I wanted, it was a lot more clear than saying a bunch of like requirements
business job description requirements. And, finally, we were able to raise over $3 million
in fundings for Foodspotting mostly based on a vision. One of our advisors, Nivi, says
that vision is great because it s free. You don t even have to build anything. You can
just make something up. And so with Foodspotting, the idea that we made up for investors, which
we really do want to become, is that Foodspotting could eventually be like Pandora for food.
Instead of just turning it on and seeing the nearest stuff, you can eventually get food
recommendations that are tailored to your tastes. And not only that, we could expand
beyond food and it could become Pandora for shopping or Pandora for gifts. And the more
you interact with it, the smarter it becomes. Investors love this idea, and last Christmas,
this past Christmas, we were able to close this round of funding. And so when I talk
about a vision, I don t mean some image in your brain that you come up with while sitting
up on a mountain top. What I mean is something that s a concrete picture of where your product
is headed. You might have heard about the idea of making the future tangible by doing
things like designing the future product box of your product before it even comes out or
writing the blog post that will come out when your product s real. For example, with my
Foodspotting team, at the beginning of the year to get everyone thinking vision oriented,
I had everyone brainstorm what tech crunch headlines they wanted to see in the coming
year, so instead of just saying we want to partner with an airline, we want to partner
with this or that, it was more specific. It was Foodspotting partners with Virgin America
to have in-flight food recommendations for your destination. You know, something that
you can picture or something everyone can rally behind. And with your teams, whether
it s your own company or whether it s a team working on a product with an organization,
the more that you can get people to think concretely, the more people will get excited
and the more likely things are to happen. The classic example of a concrete vision is
John F. Kennedy s call to put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the
decade. Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick use this as an example of a concrete vision
that would that resonated with people and got an entire country rallied behind it. He
says that if John F. Kennedy had been a CEO, he would have said, Our mission is to become
the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and
strategically targeted aerospace initiatives." Which I couldn t even remember. I had to bring
up this phone just to read that quote. [Laughter] But this you remember. I mean everybody knows
this statement, and he got people excited about it and that made it happen by articulating
in this simple concrete way. And so I ll leave you with this. If you can picture something,
you can do it. It can happen. Focus on that experience you want to create that star to
sail your ship by as Jessie and Peter always say, and everything else will fall into place
and support that. And if you want to learn more about our story and how the vision has
shaped Foodspotting, you can check out this longer presentation I ve done before. And,
finally, a shameless plug, if you have an iPhone, Android, or soon Blackberry, you can
download our apps and find dinner tonight. Thank you. Brandon Schauer: So, I think we
have just a couple of minutes for maybe one or two questions if you have it for Alexa.
And my question is, do you think after hearing about the pull approach that visions are at
all limiting? Does it feel more command and control that you re being specific, or how
do teams work in within? Cause when I think about what you ve been doing with Foodspotting,
a lot of it does fall into pull, like you re super passionate about the topics, and
your team is. You re foodies. The second when I think about serendipity, you ran into your
cofounder at one of our open tea times, and so a lot of things start to fit. I m wondering,
does vision feel constraining, or is it enabling, or does it allow for open ideas? Alexa Andrzejewski:
Yeah, that s really interesting. So, one of the big ideas that s been popular in the startup
community is this whole idea of the lean start up, which really means like kind of the ultimate
user experience driven product, where instead of having an idea of basically the premise
is like you don t know what you want to build. Your users know, so go out and ask them. And
so people have come up with an idea and then had gone out and asked the users and come
up with a totally different idea, the pivot, and everyone so, like this one app wanted
to build a check-in app, and instead they decided to build a photo sharing app, Instagram.
But to me, when I look at that story, I feel sad, cause they had an original vision, which
was to build this app that let you share where you were going, and instead it s a photo sharing
app. Which I love Instagram, but it doesn t have anything to do with their original
vision. And so I think that there s got to be some balance between being vision driven
and being user driven, which is that we re totally flexible about changing our approach.
We might completely change the language in our app. We might change the direction to
be less about the photos and more about ratings or things like that, so we re flexible with
how it s executed, but the vision underlying Foodspotting is to help people find good food.
And if we pivoted away from that vision, I would be really sad because it wouldn t solve
the problem we set out to solve in the first place, and so I think that s kind of the balance
is just knowing what you want to solve and then being flexible at how you go about solving
it and listening to users to inform that execution. [End of Audio] Alexa Andrzejewski Page PAGE
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