April 30th, 2012

Text it to Me – My Favorite Sleeper Feature

The emergence of O2O startups (the lazy person’s acronym for online-to-offline) has created a much-needed bridge for the wealth of digital information into the real world.

But from a product perspective, the interaction between online and offline is not yet seamless. You find a new coffee shop you want to try, but then how do you get the address to your phone? Maybe you save it somewhere, but it’s usually like 5 clicks into an app. There’s a deal you want to buy, but your credit card isn’t saved with this particular daily deals app. You buy a bus ticket, but then have to search in your email to actually pull up the ticket to show the driver. You see an article about some new app you want to download, but then promptly forget about it.

It’s clunky.

My favorite solution currently is the “text-it-to-me” feature. For example, check out the OnSports website. While I don’t know the numbers on this, I bet a ton of people use this feature (especially since it’s really the only thing you can do on their website). The user gets an easy way to interact with the service on his/her phone, and the owner/developer/entrepreneur is able to collect mobile phone numbers for people interested in the product.

Most people use their mobile phones for just-in-time information – where is this place I am going to right now, what emails have I received in the last hour, etc. and the usage numbers around SMS are insane. Some of the most successful startups have figured out how to leverage existing communication mechanisms to build an active user base, and while SMS has been used in the past for this sort of thing, I can’t help thinking that it has been under-utilized and there’s so many creative ways to take advantage of SMS that have not yet been explored.