Turntable.fm founder is back with a new app that's kinda like Turntable, but different
Billy Chasen can't keep track of all the apps he's made in the last two years since Turntable.fm, his once trendy social music startup, shut down for good.
There's Halfie, for sending half-selfies to people with the goal of having someone else fill in the other half with their own. And Aska, for getting verified lawyers, doctors, carpenters, whoever to answer your random questions.
"What were the other ones we listed on there?" Chasen asks when I bring up his website listing "active projects" he's working on. "Some of those may have already been sunsetted," he says, using Silicon Valley's elegant euphemism for failure.
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But that's not why we're here, in a virtual chat room with my company's name on it and our faces popping like bubbles threatening to burst as we listen to each other's voices. Chasen finally wants to show off the new app he's been working on for months and is excited about: Blockparty.
The app is intended to be a virtual gathering spot for friends or strangers. The example he loves: People stuck in the same traffic jam might find a room about it based on their location data and can start venting out loud to each other as they drive.
The app's emphasis and differentiator is supposed to be the intimacy and power of human voices over text. (You can try out the app with the code "Mashable.")
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the idea is basically Turntable.fm with a focus on voices instead of music.
"I keep coming back to how can we do things in real-time together, which is very similar to Turntable," he says, before distilling the pitch for Blockparty. "It's trying to make a social, public voice chatroom."
This is the other side of innovation, the less-discussed part. This is what happens after you've come up with the flashy idea, been called the star of the all-important SXSW tech gathering, raised millions in funding, attracted millions of users, only to watch the company die. You go back to the drawing board.
Chasen has been in this position more than most.
In 2008, he made an app for live-chatting on web pages, realized it was going nowhere and scrambled to transform the tool into Chartbeat, an analytics service that taunts media publishers to this day.
A few years later, Chasen made a barcode scanning service called StickyBits, got lots of funding for it only to realize it didn't have legs. He pivoted to launch Turntable.fm, a unique social product that resembled a virtual dance floor with DJs and earned plenty of press before it shuttered in 2014.
Chasen remains undeterred.
"The reason Turntable didn’t work is because the music industry is expensive and hard to work with and takes a lot of time, money and energy just to be in compliance," he says. "All of that doesn’t exist with this idea. Just because Turntable didn’t succeed, they are all very different animals."
After Turntable went bust, Chasen took a "couple weeks" off to travel, then decided to launch an incubator for new ideas called Ketchup -- not unlike Betaworks, which he was part of in the early days -- along with two former Turntable engineers. They raised "around a million" from Accel and got to work.
Now he's back, working on his next, next big thing mostly under the radar, trying to avoid too much press, funding and ultimately very public heartbreak, at least for now.
"It's almost like a stage performer. You are putting something out there on stage and hoping you get some feedback from the crowd. And if you don’t get some feedback, you won’t continue down that line," Chasen says. "We’re hoping the crowd talks back to us."
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Seth Fiegerman was a Senior Business Reporter at Mashable, where he covered startups, marketing and the latest consumer tech trends. He joined Mashable in August 2012 and is based in New York.Before joining Mashable, Seth covered all things Apple as a reporter at Silicon Alley Insider, the tech section of Business Insider. He has also worked as a staff writer at TheStreet.com and as an editor at Playboy Magazine. His work has appeared in Newsweek, NPR, Kiplinger, Portfolio and The Huffington Post.Seth received his Bachelor of Arts from New York University, where he majored in journalism and philosophy.In his spare time, Seth enjoys bike riding around Brooklyn and writing really bad folk songs.
