You have seen it all over. Probably been using it too. Whrrl is something that appeared like a whirlwind that has attracted social media and non social media alike. People who use Whrrl once fall in love instantly. It takes literally 5 minutes to create a Whrrl “story” and the integration makes it a breeze for anyone to use. The only thing more fascinating that the product is the way Whrrl embraces the social media community. We caught up with John Kim, Vice President, Product Management and Marketing at Pelago, the makers of Whrrl.
What is Whrrl?
Whrrl is a game-changing consumer product enabling people to explore and interact with their cities in a completely new way, discovering new places to go and specific things to do. On Whrrl, you check in to the places you go – to create an easily shared digital record of your life and unlock memberships into Whrrl Societies. Societies are people who have real-world patterns like yours. You can see who else goes to the same places and have the same real world interests you do.
Why should I care?
You should check in with Whrrl because:
- It puts you on the social grid so friends know where they are.
- The places you go and the people you are with are remembered as part of their “footstream,” visible on your Whrrl profile page. In Whrrl, you are identified by the places you go and the people you spend time with in the physical world.
- Based on check-ins, users get accepted into Whrrl Societies – micro-communities of people with the same real-world patterns. Many societies exist in Whrrl – for Indie Music people, foodies, micro-brew beer and wine aficionados, and so on. Every place in Whrrl has a Society of Regulars dedicated to it, for those who frequent that place.
- It allows you to discover places to go, specific things to do at those places and special offers.
Do you see Whrrl becoming a verb? like Google.
I like the fact that our community uses Whrrl as a verb but it is not a primary goal. Our mission is to increase the possibility of adventure and connection in your daily life.
Do you need to create a login for using the product? Is it free? Any privacy concerns since one can login through twitter or facebook account?
We prefer that users create a Whrrl account and attach their Facebook and Twitter accounts to their Whrrl account. Whrrl is free. Users have the option to share on just Whrrl as well as Facebook and/or Twitter.
How is Whrrl different from a power point slide presentation?
Whrrl is about capturing your real world patterns to discover new places and things to do. Our story presentation is designed to make it easy to organize, easy for friends to add their photos and notes and easy to share.
Do people ever come back to see their images again? Does whrrl delete old images after a while?
Yes, users love re-living their real world experiences. With Whrrl, you can remember the places, the people, the experiences in your life. Check out my profile whrrl.com/Jkimlosangeles and search @mommyniri I can remember what we ate, who we hung out with and what events we attended together.
Whrrl does not delete images. Users can.
Unlike flickr, is whrrl encouraging people to share images that may not have much artistic value? (most of the images I saw are of parties, conferences and friends etc.) Wouldn’t it be cool to have video sharing rather than just photo sharing?
Whrrl is about capturing your real world life. Video is seductive. We are experimenting. Video opens up a number of challenges. Users want to quickly see what you are doing. Video makes the experience more rich but also much heavier. Would you click on what people are doing if you opened up a two minute video every time?
Do you see Flickr and whrrl collaborating?
The possibilities are endless.
In the race to build the next new social app or social product, where does whrrl stand?
This is the most exciting time to be in the industry. We are building a great community and how the product is progressing. We feel great about where we stand.
How did you build whrrl? Concept, prototype, user trials, adoption, feedback, apps etc.
We started with concepts and massive user testing. We build prototype versions of every app we release and test them with community members.
What are the key elements of adoption strategy of a social product like whrrl?
We focus much of our energy on our unlocking our community, creating value and iterating quickly so we can grow.
What would it take to increase the user adoption to over 5 million users?
I believe we will see mainstream value as check-ins grow in value. There is tremendous potential behind activating consumers based on the place they are at.
What features are important for user adoption vs. user retention (people coming back and using the product more)?
You must engineer engagement that allows your community to drive adoption and retention for you.
How do you experiment with the product features? any viral feedback process?
Yes, we get feedback from our community and we evaluate our metrics daily.
Would you say whrrl is a success story?
Hard to say this without sounding arrogant but I deeply believe Whrrl is the brink of being a breakout success story.
How do you monetize traffic?
We just launched a pilot merchant offer program. We believe we will be able to scale this to powerful monetization engine.
Where will whrrl be in 2011?
I can’t predict that far ahead. Let’s book another interview one year from now.
