Thread by @dksf

1/ A thread on “Fireside: my startup that will now not launch”.

TLDR: We spent the past 6 months building a tool to help people create live call-in shows together (a.k.a. “talk-radio”). It was called Fireside. Based on the “go live together” Periscope launch this past week...

2/ ...we’ve decided to not pursue it further since they’re doing a good job at executing the core idea.

Story and thinking below 👇

3/ Talk radio is all about the on-air people and personalities. It’s a great way to listen and learn from people. The call-in show format gives the ability for anyone to have access to the thinking and knowledge present inside peoples’ heads.

4/ A lot of the world’s knowledge is never written down and published on the Internet and continues to only be accessible by talking to people.

A tool like Fireside represents the future of talk radio.

5/ Over the years I’ve built a lot of consumer communication tools. Helping people connect is the best use of the Internet, imo. 🙂

My first “talk radio” project was in 2011 when we built and launched blip.me as a short-form async audio publishing tool.

6/ I’ve been a huge believer in audio as a format and I have deep conviction that it’s an important part of the Internet that’s still missing a platform.

The human voice is the most authentic and natural modality to communicate — voice conversations must become Internet native.

7/ I spent a lot of time in-between blip.me and 2018 organizing private community gatherings where I would interview someone interesting in front of a group of people in my network. It was all conducted in-person.

8/ The gatherings always had a lot of energy and some of the community members asked that I do the interviews via Skype and patch them in since they were rarely in San Francisco.

9/ I found organizing these salons to be really fun and educational for me. They gave me access to all kinds of interesting people and top thinkers across subject matter I chose.

10/ I had been thinking about building tools to serve this community. I was discussing my interest with @naval and he said he would like to be able to do live interviews with people that he likes to talk to online.

11/ Between my own needs and the needs of other people in my network I decided that we should focus on building a tool to serve this.

We mocked-up the concept and began to believe in it more. We built a prototype and it worked really well.

12/ We iterated through a bunch of the core UI/UX of the service. It was pretty clear that there was something interesting here.

Next we layered on the core product messaging to help explain this new behavior to people. Here’s how the onboarding screens of Fireside look:

13/ Here’s the design mockup for the core live/chat experience:

14/ At this point we have the whole thing embodied in live working software and it’s working really well. It’s about 80-90% done, but needs more polish before it would be ready to launch.

15/ Then we saw the Periscope news this past week from @jack and @kayvz:

medium.com/@periscope/go-…

16/ I’ve played with the new Periscope tool and I think they’ve done a pretty good job of executing a v1. I’m sure they will continue to iterate and improve the service from here.

17/ I think there are interesting modes they can continue to explore which mix video and audio in this live interview/call-in format. I’m happy to see innovation happening here.

18/ This format also has the potential to be a monster of a business. Talk radio represents huge advertising dollars in terrestrial radio formats.

19/ Audio advertising doesn't currently have a dominant Internet platform aggregator. I’m also intrigued by empowering direct pay opportunities for audiences to pay creators.

20/ Making a platform accessible to a new class of creators could open up a unique set of content that we don’t have in podcasting and the more professional audio formats we do have today.

21/ Existing formats of audio content may have natural aggregation points around an audience that assembles for new creators (e.g. existing podcasts and licensed music).

22/ So in summary, it’s farewell to the Fireside dream. But, to be honest, it’s also a bit of a relief for me. I was simultaneously building another very different communication tool to serve book clubs on the Internet.

23/ The book club tool is called Highlighter (highlighter.app) and, candidly, I’m much happier being able to focus all my attention and energy on trying to make just this one thing really great.

24/ So I wish good luck to @jack @kayvz and the @periscope team. I will be rooting for you from the sidelines on this one.