{"id":15352,"date":"2019-06-13T17:01:07","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T17:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/calendar-influencers-event-social-network-irl-raises-8m.html"},"modified":"2019-06-13T17:01:07","modified_gmt":"2019-06-13T17:01:07","slug":"calendar-influencers-event-social-network-irl-raises-8m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/calendar-influencers-event-social-network-irl-raises-8m.html","title":{"rendered":"Calendar influencers? Event social network IRL raises $8M"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why is there<\/span> no app where you can follow party animals, concert snobs, or conference butterflies for their curated suggestions of events? That\u2019s the next phase of social calendar app IRL<\/a> that\u2019s launching today on iOS<\/a> to help you make and discuss plans with friends or discover nearby happenings to fill out your schedule.<\/p>\n

The calendar, a historically dorky utility, seems like a strange way to start the next big social network. Many people, especially teens, either don\u2019t use apps like Google Calendar, keep them professional, or merely input plans made elsewhere. But by baking in an Explore tab of event recommendations and the option to follow curators, headliners, and venues, IRL <\/a> could make calendars communal like Instagram did to cameras.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s Twitter for \u2018follow my updates\u2019, there\u2019s Soundcloud for \u2018follow my music\u2019, but there\u2019s no \u2018follow my events’\u201d IRL CEO Abe Shafi tells me of his plan to turbocharge his calendar app. \u201cThey\u2019re arguably the best product that\u2019s been built for organizing what you\u2019re doing but no one has Superhuman\u2019d or Slack\u2019d the calendar. Let\u2019s build a super f*cking dope calendar!\u201d he says with unbridled excitement. He\u2019ll need that passion to persevere as IRL tries to steal a major use case from SMS, messaging apps, and Facebook <\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Finding a new opportunity for a social network has attracted a new $8 million Series A funding round for IRL led by Goodwater Capital and joined by Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins. That builds on its $3 million seed from Founders Fund and Floodgate, whose partner Mike Maples is joining IRL\u2019s board. The startup has also pulled in some entertainment and event CEOs as strategic investors including Warner Bros president Greg Silverman, Lionsgate films president Joe Drake, and Classpass CEO Fritz Lanman to help it recruit calendar influencers users can follow.<\/p>\n

Filling Your Social Calendar<\/h2>\n

In Shafi, investors found a consumate extrovert who can empathize with event-goers. He dropped out of Berkeley to build out his recruitment software startup getTalent <\/a> before selling it to HR platform Dice where he became VP of product. He started to become disillusioned by tech\u2019s impact on society and almost left the industry before some time at Burning Man rekinkled his fever for events.<\/p>\n

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IRL CEO Abe Shafi<\/p>\n

Shafi teamed up with PayPal\u2019s first board member Scott Banister and early social network founder Greg Tseng. Shafi\u2019s first attempted Gather<\/a> pissed off a ton of people with spammy invites in 2017. By 2018, he\u2019d restarted as IRL<\/a> with a focus on building a minimalist calendar where it was easy to create events and invite friends. Evite and Facebook Events were too heavy for making less formal get-togethers with close friends. He wisely chose to geofence his app and launch state by state to maximize density so people would have more pals to plan with.<\/p>\n

IRL<\/a> is now in 14 states with a modest 1.3 million monthly active users and 175,000 dailies, plus 3 million people on the waitlist. \u201c50% of all teens in Texas have downloaded IRL. I wanted to focus on the central states, not Silicon Valley\u201d Shafi explains. Users log in with a phone number or Google, two-way sync their Google Calendar if they have one, and can then manage their existing schedule and create mini-events. The stickiest feature is the ability to group chat with everyone invited so you can hammer out plans. Even users without the app can chime in via text or email. And unlike Facebook where your mom or boss are liable to see your RSVPs, your calendar and what you\u2019re doing on IRL is always private unless you explicitly share it.<\/p>\n

The problem is that most of this could be handled with SMS and a more popular calendar. That\u2019s why IRL is doubling-down on event discovery through influencers, which you can\u2019t do anywhere else at scale. With the new version of the app launching today, you\u2019ll be recommended performers, locations, and curators to follow. You\u2019ll see their suggestions in the Explore tab that also includes sub-tabs of Nearby and Trending happenings. There\u2019s also a college-specific feed for users that auth in with their school email address. Curators and event companies like TechCrunch can get their own IRL.com\/\u2026 URL<\/a> people can follow more easily than some janky list of events of gallery of flyers on their website. Since pretty much every promoter wants more attendees, IRL\u2019s had little resistance to it indexing all the events from Meetup.com and whatever it can find.<\/p>\n

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IRL is concentrating on growth for now, but Shafi believes all the intent data about what people want to do could be valuable for directing people to certain restaurants, bars, theaters, or festivals, though he vows that \u201cwe\u2019re never going to sell your data to advertisers.\u201d For now IRL is earning money from affiliate fees when people buy tickets or make reservations. Event affiliate margins are infamously slim, but Shafi says IRL can bargain for higher fees as it gains sway over more people\u2019s calendars.<\/p>\n

\"\"Unfortunately without reams of personal data and leading artificial intelligence that Facebook owns, IRL\u2019s in-house suggestions via the Explore tab can feel pretty haphazard. I saw lots of mediocre happy hours, crafting nights, and community talks that weren\u2019t quite the hip nightlife recommendations I was hoping for, and for now there\u2019s no sorting by category. That\u2019s where Shafi hopes influencers will fill in. And he\u2019s confident that Facebook\u2019s business model discourages it moving deeper into events. \u201cFacebook\u2019s revenue driver is time spent on the app. While meaningful to society, events as a feature is not a primary revenue driver so they don\u2019t get the resources that other features on Facebook get.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the biggest challenge will be rearranging how people organize their lives. A lot of us are too scatterbrained, lazy, or instinctive to make all our plans days or weeks ahead of time and put them on a calendar. The beauty of mobile is that we can communicate on the fly to meet up. \u201cSolving for spontaneity isn\u2019t our focus so far\u201d Shafi admits. But that\u2019s how so much of our social lives come together.<\/p>\n

My biggest problem isn\u2019t finding events to fill my calendar, but knowing which friends are free<\/a> now to hang out and attend one with me. There are plenty of calendar, event discovery, and offline hangout apps. IRL<\/a> will have to prove they deserve to be united. At least Shafi says it\u2019s problem worth trying to solve. \u201cI know for a fact that the product of a calendar will outlive me.\u201d He just wants to make it more social first.<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/rbtL3M_k8Fo\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why is there no app where you can follow party animals, concert snobs, or conference butterflies for their curated suggestions of events? That\u2019s the next phase of social calendar app <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-15352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t