BetaTown

We went out for Sushi last night (Ken, my wife Cheryl and I) and had a very interesting conversation. Conversation between us tends to veer towards problems and solutions (at their essence potential business ideas), this one was about creating a town based on current web-based app/small business thinking, in the process revitalizing the concept of community and what would makes a town interesting to live in (not  bad for a dinner conversation!).

First we detailed the various things that are necessary for a town to remain interesting over time (in no particular order):

1. a grocery store & farmers market
2. a sushi restaurant
3. a dive bar (e.g. a run down corner bar that doesn’t necessarily serve your fav. beer, but it’s a still a great place to hang out)
4. a club-like bar (e.g. where you can buy cocktails)
5. at least 2 coffee shops
6. 2-3 different sized live venues (to stay entertained of course!)
7. wifi throughout (didn’t think we’d forget that did you?)

I’m sure there were a few more details, but you get the idea. Now the interesting part…how to populate the place (and keep the jerks out).

Stealing a little from Eric Ries‘ Minimum Viable Product strategy and a little from Google’s Gmail invitation rollout we decided that the best thing to do would be to only build the absolute necessities first. We’d seed the initial population by sending out beta invites to let’s say 1000 people. These first people would need to be self-starters, not necessarily entrepreneurs, but people that aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty even if “it’s not their job”. In my opinion they’d probably mostly be small business type people as these people would need to be very understanding of the need to adapt as necessary.

As these first people “signed-up” to move to town it would then be determined which of the necessary features (listed above or suggested by resident feedback) would be next on the list to be completed.

Based on use of this new community, and established trust) each of these people would 5-20 invites that they could use to invite more people to move to town (exact criteria would need to be worked out to base the # of invites on).

A few questions do remain though…would BetaTown be self-policing?  What about a hospital?  Can we unfriend citizens?

We’ll probably need some funding for this one (something I’ve never had before) and probably need to compile a list of ideal town candidates…ok, maybe we need to see a few other ideas through first before tackling this one!

This entry was written by Andrew, posted on February 15, 2010 at 10:03 am, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.