Foursquare founders celebrate as site hits 1m user milestone
It looks like the founders of Foursquare are getting ready to enjoy Happy Hour in New York to celebrate the site hitting the 1m user mark
Foursquare, at only one year old is still deemed a start-up, Twitter on the other hand had reached the ripe old age of two before signing up its 1millionth user.
However, the new baby is now confronting some very grown-up issues; whether to sell the business or raise more venture capital according to its 33 year old chief executive Dennis Crowley.
However, he failed to answer the question on many analysts lips – how much does he think the business is worth, and who are his potential suitors?
“We’ll do whatever is best for the product,” Crowley said in an interview earlier today. “We’ll have it resolved in a couple of weeks. I want to end the distractions and get back to work.”
Foursquare has grown from a base of 170,000 users at the end of last year. According to reports in the US the business would be extremely attractive to those looking to expand the wireless local-advertising market.
The Foursquare game – which allows users to tap into the GPS location services on their mobile phones – rewards users for visiting different locations. They can collect awards which range from vouchers, to being able to lay claim to being the Mayor of a particular place.
Now some analysts say that this developing voucher market could account for as much as $4billion in yearly advertising spend by 2015.
At one stage it was thought Yahoo! Inc. was considering buying Foursquare for about $100 million. However, The Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch reported yesterday that Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. have been in talks with the company.
But Crowley said many of the reports are not accurate.
“People are just making stuff up” he said.
In the UK, Debenhams and Domino's Pizza became the first major UK brands to target consumers via Foursquare.
Companies support the service by offering deals to participants based, for example, on the number of times someone ‘checks in' to their local branch.
The benefits for brands include increased footfall. Debenhams and Domino's are using Foursquare as a customer-retention tool.
But tonight such talk of brand strategy and venture capital probably won’t be front of mind. In a Tweet earlier this week the team gave a clue as to what they will be doing tonight if they hit the 1million milestone: "We're closing in on one million users! Current count is 9969,775. Looks like that we may have something to toast during Friday Happy Hour".