Original Post: http://bryce.vc/post/18065622441

It was to good to not re-post – for some reason it really struck a chord.

First up: Polls.

Polls are found inside a plan (group chats) with friends.  Just click the little button that looks like a poll in the footer (seen left) to get to them. From there you can either vote on or start a new poll.

The Point:  Majority rules.  We always want to make the democratic decision when deciding on things with friends so that the most people are happy.  Polls lets you do this and organize votes when there a bunch of options on the table, and shows who voted for what (so you can then argue with them

The Process: Starting a poll is simple, just press the start button and you’ll be presented with this screen – enter anything and as little or much as you want for each.

Once the poll is created it will show in the polls tab, where everyone can vote on it and constantly see what the most popular choice is for a given question.  Just click the box to vote.  You can change it anytime and as many times as you want.

Creating and voting on any poll will show in the group chat, so all your friends see when one is created and when someone votes.

So go and create one as your planning what to do next with friends.  See if it helps you figure out a decision no one wanted to make the final call on.

Have a good day all -

- Nick

Menus will be available in the Android app tomorrow, and in the iPhone app early next week (pending Apple’s review process period of course)

— Marc Andreessen

Found in article from Nivi (http://venturehacks.com/articles/plans-ndas-traction)

“What’s going on?” is the simple question that started one hell of a complex journey.  That one simple question is preloaded with so many more questions it’s taken us a solid year to figure them out. But how could such a simple question have such a complex answer? Without getting into the research we did, think about ‘Why’ you’ve ever asked it yourself; possibly you asked a close friend to find out if they wanted to hangout or already had plans, possibly you asked an acquaintance because you were curious if they knew of something going on that you didn’t.  The ultimate goal of asking “What’s going on?” is to directly or indirectly fulfill your social life needs by making plans and hoping they’re great.

Making plans is a pain in the butt, and nobody really wants to do it, but we deal with it because our social lives oblige us to do so.  Since it’s our social life beckoning us to ask “What’s going on?” without question of incentive, now think about ‘How’ we go about it. Communication tools like texting, email, facebook messenger, and group chat apps are our means to ask the question. The problem is we want to make plans knowing they’ll be great, and so we want to consume as much information as possible to make our decision. Questions like “Who’s free when?”, “Who wants to do what?”, and “What’s there to do anyway?” all need to be answered. Then there’s the whole commitment issue; not many people like to commit to something because a better option might arise at any time.

Shizzlr 1.0 failed 9 months ago at making the planning process enjoyable. That attempt didn’t succeed for  many reasons, but the primary reason was we hadn’t yet fully baked the entire problem into our solution. Essentially we had made an average group chat application with a bit of social event discovery.  We were also focused on continuously iterating the product to make it better, but our focus fell towards more of what we thought it needed to be versus going out and into the field and finding out how the rest of the world views social planning.

Why did we keep going? Oddly enough, we never asked ourselves that question. Everyone on the team believes that trying to make plans with friends is a pain in the butt, and planning should be enjoyable. We believe that it should be fun to discover what’s going on and simple to figure out the details of a plan. Even though our first version didn’t solve the problem, it was the belief in making something that could make our lives, everyone’s lives better. So over the past 6 months we dug hard into the problem and built a complete redesign on the whys and hows of “What’s going on?”  We looked at our user data, talked with people about how they make their everyday plans, watched best practices of other privately natured social companies, and after 6 months of consecutive 18-hr days, came up with Shizzlr 2.0.

Launching Shizzlr 2.0 –  Shizzlr 2.0 is a mashup of group chat + venues + event discovery wrapped up in a very simple design.  So simple in fact it really only has 1 button: “Start” a plan.  By leveraging Kik’s API, tapping into Foursquare’s venues, and geolocating public Facebook events, we believe Shizzlr 2.0 will certainly improve our social experience of making everyday casual plans.  These elements are provided thru the “What’s up feed” when you open the app, and a “Super Chat” when you start a plan.

The “What’s up feed” is one list, starting with your plans, events you’ve saved as potential plans, your Facebook events (because some of them are potential plans too), and then it flows into a day-by-day snapshot of friends plans, Facebook friends events, public things going on around town, and popular places to go; so you’ve got all of that great info available with just a flick of the thumb to scroll.   There’s only one button on top of the “What’s up feed” and that’s to start a plan.

The “Super Chat” captures the process of plan making. There’s a difference between making a plan and starting a plan. Most of us don’t like to make plans because it implies we have set details within the plan and we’re committed to them; well not on Shizzlr. On Shizzlr you ‘Start’ a plan, by selecting some friends, adding a title, and then the what/when/where details are optional so you can fill them in later when the “Super Chat” starts.  We just call it “Super Chat” because it’s awesome, but it’s really you and your friends discussing the plan details, and being able to share events and places as options into the chat, as well as create simple polls.  Of course there are other features in there too like checking into Foursquare when you’ve arrived at your plan destination, Kik’ing your plan to Kik if you’re a Kik user, and awarding funny medals like ‘Beer goggles’ to friends in the plan.

So present day in our journey, we are now officially launching Shizzlr 2.0.  We’re excited to get friends, family, new and old users to see what we have poured our hearts into and love using ourselves.  We finally feel that with this version we can make people’s lives easier so they can enjoy life with friends.

Or just visit our pretty website

(and Tom if you’ll notice, I’ve added some tasks to your to-do list so get to cranking them out because we’ve got an important email to send to you know who)

The team is pretty jazzed up right now about officially launching Shizzlr next week and some of our friends with the early versions of the apps have said they’re pretty stellar.

Foursquare is the ‘checkin’ app. Path is the ‘journal’ app. Instagram is the ‘picture sharing’ app. Runkeeper is the ‘running’ app. Kik might be the ‘group chat’ app. Shizzlr is certainly going to be the ‘planning with friends’ app. This also might be happening because app design is finally hitting it’s stride. Look at Path; getting all of their content into one stream and only one button for contribution, brilliant. It’s funny how website design tends to decrease scrolling and increase clicks, but app design is the opposite; increase scrolling/swiping and reduce taps.  Anyway this is just an observation of the app space in general and maybe a feel for one of many things that’ll happen in 2012.

With every new year, we have our resolutions, we welcome the new, say good bye to the old, and erase the white board so we can fill it again with amazing ideas.

I’m looking forward to this year because this year is our showoff year for Shizzlr. We get to show off what we’ve been doing for the past year. We’ve made a lot of personal sacrifices to make Shizzlr 2.0, and it’s all because we believe in what we’re doing. We’ve been on that psuedo random sinusoidal wave of elation and frustration almost non stop 18hrs/day, 30 days/month, 353 days of the past year, and I’ll tell you this – it’s only the belief of building something so great that could possibly motivate, drive, and carry anybody thru that process. We’ll have to maintain this effort and energy through 2012 to get Shizzlr 2.0 out there and continue to develop it further until it becomes the ‘this is how I make plans with my friends’ app as we envision it. I know upon presentation of Shizzlr, we’re going to be asked all sorts of questions, but the ultimate core of any question will be ‘why?’ so I’ll try to address that now…

Why did we ‘do Shizzlr’?

Think about the last time you made plans with friends to get a beer or a coffee or just to hangout. You had fun right? Now think about the process of making those plans. Either you’ve forgotten about it because it was just that, forgettable. Or maybe it was a bit frustrating because you had to spend time communicating back and forth to figure out who was free when, who wanted to do what, and what was there to do anyway. We all go through the planning process solely because we assume the result is going to be worth it, but why should we have to ‘endure’ making plans when we could ‘enjoy’ making plans?

Everyone makes plans with their friends to do something. We make plans by using communication tools like texting, email, Facebook messenger, and even group message apps like GroupMe. These communication tools work great for connecting with friends, but don’t work great for making a simple plan to hangout and that’s because they were designed for communication, not planning.

We built Shizzlr because we believe that planning should feel effortless, and be as enjoyable as the plans themselves. It should be fun to discover what’s going on, simple to share places to go, events to do, and easy to chat as a group to figure out the details. Shizzlr is the easy-simple-efficient-enjoyable planning tool that enables all of this. It still uses the communication tools, so when you start a plan on Shizzlr, your friends, who don’t even have to be on Shizzlr, will get a text or an email or a Facebook post about the plan. Of course if they have our Android or IPhone app, then they’ll get an app notification, and all of this is accessible and fully functional on our website too.

We ‘do Shizzlr’ because we’re all in that aspect of our lives where social planning is important. We deal with it on a daily basis, and the status quo of just accepting using communication tools to make plans just isn’t acceptable. I doubt we’re the first ones to make such a statement, and I know we’re not the first to make a planning tool, but planning is an undocumented non-linear multi-variable process when you break it down, so developing a tool to map this is anything but trivial. However, like anything else, you spend a long enough time period learning something with intense effort, you will become damn good at it, and I think this is where our breakthrough will finally shine in Shizzlr 2.0

I can’t wait to launch Shizzlr 2.0 in a couple weeks, and to see how great we can make this in 2012.