A simple dinner off campus is scheduled for Saturday at 7 p.m. Then Mark can’t make it because he has a meeting, and Liz might be an hour late. Now Tom’s not too excited, with Mark and Liz out. “We’ll find another time,” they say. Of course, the dinner never happens.
In short, scheduling fun is pretty much no fun.
That’s why Stanford alumni Henry Lee ’08 and Ambert Ho ’06 created Kickin.it, a mobile application that they say cuts out the headache of planning gatherings ahead of time and allows them to happen spontaneously.
“A lot of the vision of the product comes from our social interactions while we were in college,” Ho said. “The idea is that we’re making a product that’s extremely easy to share who you’re with in the context of what you’re doing, and then also make it as easy as possible to find out who to hang out with.”
The application is a live-stream communication platform with origins in the founders’ days as students broadcasting various campus events. Two things happened that triggered the inspiration to use real-time technology in their business venture. First, through a Fleet Street concert broadcast they met an alum and seasoned Silicon Valley veteran who later became one of Kickin.it’s advisors.
Second, they raised a good chunk of change for Dance Marathon by broadcasting the event—a little fist pump in the air that, according to Ho, led them to think, “Okay, let’s just do something that’s purely helpful and we’ll go from there and see how it goes.”
Here’s how Kickin.it works. Users can post what they are doing to a network of friends by inputting their activities as an update, dubbed a “hangout.” They may designate the time of the event as “now,” “soon” or “later,” tag friends who are present and invite others to join. For example, a Kickin.it hangout might read, “Watching ‘How I Met Your Mother’ while making pasta in my room with John Doe and Jane Doe.”
What makes the impromptu get-togethers possible is the application’s ability to allow users to continuously tag friends, augmenting the hangout as attendees appear. It takes the guesswork out of choosing whether to partake in an event depending on the crowd, or when the optimum time to pop up might be.
“Right now we’re operating under the assumption that location is important, but the primary importance is who it is,” Ho said.
In fact, the whole thing seems like a combination of Facebook status updates, Facebook Places and Facebook Events, all bundled into a single user interface.
“We’re absolutely optimizing for a very lightweight mobile experience,” Lee said. “It’s very clean, and you don’t have to sift through the Facebook clutter.”
But like many applications nowadays, Kickin.it may be integrated with Facebook via Facebook Connect. Down the road, Lee and Ho hope to tighten privacy settings and categorize friend groups such that only specific people may view the hangouts. After all, you likely don’t want some creeper joining in on your pasta-making party.
“We understand that privacy is definitely a big concern, particularly for Stanford students, and Facebook has screwed the pooch a couple times,” Lee said. “We’re moving toward a more powerful product optimized for a subset of your Facebook friends—the people you interact with in real life or maybe even those you would like to interact with.”
“If Facebook is a chainsaw, we’re trying to be a scalpel,” Ho added.
For Lee and Ho, the poor job market presented an opportunity to take a chance, mobilize their savings and go forth with an idea.
“These breaks are how you propel your life forward,” Ho said.
They could not stress enough the role the Stanford community continues to play in the development of their product.
“We’ve seen how the current students are helpful in just talking to them, trying to learn from them, and the community in all facets was helpful in encouraging our startup efforts,” Lee said.