Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub), which... → Learn More
It’s been a long time since we were delighted and even slightly bemused by the utterly stripped down simplicity of Twitter. And let’s face it, there have been many pretenders to that simplistic interface crown since then. But Amen appears to have come up with a mellifluous new take on a mobile service which is tantalisingly simple, but designed to create masses amounts of data about things people like.
Put simply, Amen is about finding the best of everything, often via arguments over the worst. To get the app go to getamen.com/tc in your Safari on the iPhone, sign up and download it OverTheAir. There are about 2,000 sign ups for Techcrunch Disrupt.
Here’s how it works. You fire up the app on the iPhone or web browser and say a person, place or thing is “the best” or “the worst” ever, like like, the Best Dubstep track ever. Or perhaps, as actress Demi Moore (a beta user) puts it, “After Sex is the Best State For Amening Ever.” Hubbie Ashton Kutcher – an investor – “Led Zeppelin is the best rock band ever.” You can agree with this statement with an “Amen”. But with a “Hell no” you have to suggest an alternative answer. It’s a rigid structure, but you can post whatever you want.
Leaving aside reading between the lines of Demi’s post (as tempting as it is) the creation of the simple “Amen” or “Hell No” mechanic means Amen can create lots of definitive data about something. For instance, right now Amen says “The Best Place for Mexican Food in San Mateo is Taqueria La Cumbre. Of course, you might disagree…
The location of any Amen statement is also built into the app, meaning Amen will start to tell you the best things around you.
But more interesting than that, it generates a feed from users who see lots of potentially divisive statements from their friends.
This is when the gaming element kicks in because you can weigh in and vehemently disagree with a person. This not just a Dilike button – you can only disagree, typing “hell no” – by suggesting a replacement to the post.
That means Amen gets continually more finessed data each time. Crucially, each statement is a data point.
So where as Twitter and its thousands of third party developers have had to apply tortuous natural language algorithms to the firehose in order to work out what the hell is going on, Amen has all this data and structure pre-built in to its system. It’s like one big brawl to find the best stuff, but this time with rules so simple you don’ even notice them.
So the whole system is built from the ground up to bubble-up the best of everything in the world.
Founderr Felix says users of the closed beta have been posting about TV shows, of coffee houses, The worst airline, the best position for sex. Literally everything. In addition people use it to create a kind of status update which their friends can agree or disagree with, e.g. “This bar is the best place for meeting Mike.”
Then again it might be something more nuanced, such as…
Or more inside baseball:
Or more gamed:
The startup has been in closed private beta for the last month and now has 3,500 users, generating quite a lot of engagement. In one month those users created 30,000 statements, created 15,500 score cards and clicked the Amen button 80,000 times.
An unintended use is using is as a Q&A platform, and then finding the thing you were after, like asking “Who is the best Dentist in Berlin” and people disputing that and entering their suggestion.
People have also been talking about everything from brand to what the best jokes are, to the best playlists.
Of course, it’s the brands element to this that has a lot of potential. Brands can get feedback on what people are saying about them, definitely, in realtime and to a high level of accuracy because it’s all structured data. This is much harder in Twitter because there is no structured data to mine, just people random words.
Plus, Amen is de-duping all the words and lists, so there is no duplication, no fat in the system.
And because its starts suggesting things to you, it can start to predict what you are planning to type. The same goes for location where the Amen iPhone might already know you are in a particular bar.
Lists don’t just generate one answer – there is a long tail of answers after the top result. So they get the head and the long tail of results. Even an answer with only two votes will still appear in the system.
Yes, the best movie ever made bay end up being agreed on (it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey).
Amen’s game plan is engagement first, and get big. Then to enable discovery and utility. Monetisation comes afterwards and could consist of ad buys within the lists, like AdWords.
The startup has raised a Seed funding from Index Ventures and Kutcher.
The team itself is sterling. CEO and Founder Felix Petersen formerly founded Plazes, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. There is also Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared), and Florian Weber, Twitter’s first engineer interviewed here).
But finally, here is a problem. In theory Amen could be copyable, assuming someone can think out how to structure this data. It’s barrier to entry might therefore be lower. But then, how many startups already have Demi Moore as a private – poised to be public – beta user?
Presentation:
don't want to give anything away but an almost unpronounceable name.
Ok are you guys ready. Please welcome to the stage Amen.
Hello everybody?
Hi, I'm Kaitlyn.
I'm Felix, from Amen. The best and worse of everything, so Aman essentially is a platform for posting strong opinions about people, places and things. So if you switch to iPhone right now we'll see Kaitlyn using our iPhone client posting an opinion. So here you can see, you choose between a place, a person or a thing, so let's talk about a place for example, and this is the structure you have to post in so it's a really rigid structure but within this structure you can do whatever you want.
So here we're pulling location information of stuff that's near by. So just say, let's say we go with Tech Crunch disrupt. And then, now you total between the best and the worst. These are really only two options you have on this service. So whatever you have to say, you have to say in this structure.
So you say, is the best place for, let's say, launching, but you could type anything in here, people get really creative with it. And then you choose what we call a scope. You say in the world, or just post Amen. And now that goes up to the servicing gets posted to Kaitlyn's profile. Let's just look at a different example, maybe a thing.
So earlier here I actually saw someone running around with these hideous, what do you call these, the five finger shoes? So I'm going to say the five finger shoes is actually the worst thing ever, so Kaitlyn types in five finger shoes, were actually hitting the database trying to see do we have something in there already.
So for a lot of celebrities and you know, companies and organizations we already have something. In this case not, so I'll say it's the worst thing ever post, right? So you see it's very conversational, it's really close to how people talk. Now if we switch back to the web, we're now gonna show Kaitlyn being logged in to a her profile, so here she sees all the Amens posted by people that she follows.
So here, as what I just said, TechCrunch is the best place for launching in the world. And now this is the nucleus of Amen. This is the kind of statement. All of these statements have a common URL. You can share them to Twitter and Facebook. And now Amen, being a really strong declaration of affirmation, if she agrees with me now she can say Amen and basically agreees with me.
now Now there's two people Amening this statement, if you will. Now, this other thing that I posted, that shoes is the worst footwear ever. So.
And actually here, I have to disagree, Felix. I'm going to say hell no. Actually After living in Germany for two years I can definitively say the worst footwear ever is Sandals and Size. There's some truth in that.
So what you saw here if you can dispute me, you can say hell no it's kind of like of a dislike button but you have to say what you think is better. And you can only change the one part of the sentence. You can only change the part of the sentence that is sort of the object as what we call it.
So now, to reiterate on that. Somebody goes in and says, for example, Breaking Bad is the best TV show ever. Someone else comes in and says hell no. Mad Men is the best TV show ever. Yet another person, and this is the kind of thing that we all know, from you know, being in a bar or in a pub.
And somebody else comes in and says the Wire is the best TV show ever. So what you see emerging here is a list about the best TV show ever. And that's exactly what happens here. You have a list that emerges. And then these bars are how many people have Amen'd and effectively voted on that particular statement.
So, just by having a conversation a littleback and forth between friends basically we end up with a structured list and you see that fourteen people are aim at twin peeks nineteen people aim at the wire. So we basically we turn, you know status update, it is something very conversational into structured data that has real utility and every Aman that gets posted basic accounts.
We've been in private beta now for just a month and we've had 3,000 people using the service, and just to give you an idea how incredibly sticky it is. It was three thousand people using it and they made thirty thousand of those Amans. And those are not just our friends. And there was eighty thousand people basically voting on these statements by pressing the Aman button.
And out of that emerged fifteen thousand, so its pretty amazing. By just three thousand people using it for a month. You get such credible wealth of structured data. And people have been talking about anything whether it's the place for organic coffee in San Francisco, whether it's the best place for cocktails for in Berlin, whether it's you know the brand experience whatever the We're talking about the worst airline ever.
People have using this as a status update mechanism. So, they have been saying, what was the best state for evening after sex, I think the other one was drunk. And then you know, interesting, what we saw happening, and this is know when it really works. When you see unintended use, right? People have been turning it into a Q;A thing by saying, who is the best dentist in Berlin.
And then by disputing it, you're basically answering the question. You end up with a bunch of answers and the list. And it's a lot of fun and word play.
Not everything is useful, but a lot of it is really great, and just fun. Like procrastination is the best nation ever, and then there was this whole thing about what is the best nation. So it really means already, with three thousand users. What we found was interesting people basically created a backlog for us by telling us, what is the best feature that Amen could introduce.
And you see that eighty people in here said that search would be the first thing that they wanted to see, and so on and so forth. So to sum it up I think it has a lot of things that I think make a great consumer internetApp right or service? Everyone gets it right away. It's very conversationalist.
How you talk anyway. It's very fun to use, extremely addictive. You come back, people just dispute you that who you back by saying, "You're wrong dude," but it has incredible utility that actually evolves out of it in the form of structure data and of course monetization opportunities if you look at this list.
All these things are public so all of these lists and individual statements can be found by Google, which drives a lot of air traffic. Ya and so one last thing, so we're going out of close bidder today if you go to getamen.com/disrupt you can sign up right now. There is about two thousand sign ups that we allow through that URL.
So go on there right now. Try it out for yourself. You can open the URL iPhone or on your browser, if you open on your iPhone you get that if you open in your laptop you can sign up and use it on your browser.
Ok.
Thank you.OK . April.
Sure, so I think it's a really clean looking product. Obviously you guys are trying to keep it very simple, which I can appreciate. I thought it was interesting that you showed the example where users were already starting to try to deviate from what you originally had in mind, starting to ask questions.
So, for me, it kind of begs the question as to whether users have a really strong demand to express these statements in a structured way. So you know if you start to see more things like that. How do you plan to react? Do you plan to sort of modify the other ways that users take the platform? Or do you really have a clear vision here where you want to stick with the original purpose and keep it pretty narrow.
I think the latter. I mean it depends a little bit, of course we'll listen, we see how people use the product. But the interesting thing is for example, in the beginning a lot of people said I want comments. You say one thing, I say the other, and then its kind of like how can I answer back and the interesting thing is because we don't have comments, really interesting ways of answering that person emerged.
And that way we get actually more sort of valuable amens instead of having a long common thread where a lot of this stuff is lost. Like someone would say in the comments, no you're wrong, delta is the best. We can't record that right. So we're keeping it very simple and structured. The value of the data goes up, but also, a lot people have told us it's easier for me to answer, and to be funny in a rigid structure, you know?
Sometimes, if you give people a blank piece of paper, it's harder to come up with something. If you just answer because here you get inspirations. You know, somebody says, Madonna is the one named celebrity. And you answer, no it's Elvis. You never would have thought about posting that usually. So... But to answer
your question, I don't think that there is [xx]. We're still kind of feeling how people are using the platform, and we're not pushing it in any specific direction at the point of people end up asking a lot of questions, then that's ok.
Ok Josh. So, I'm an investor in Forma Springs. I have some insider information about kind of the space. And I was surprised you took it down the path you did. I thought you were going to make it more relevant for me personally. For all of us personally versus showing kind of a list that kinda comes from sources and people you may or may not know.
So, I, you know use cases you didn't show. But ending up with a list that comes from the general population, I think that's kind of been done. Showing me some how, relating it to me making it relevant to me. Because it's, you know, it's a list that was created by my friends, or people I trust, people I follow on twitter.
That would have been maybe talk about how you ended up at this more general list experience.
So, we have a follow model, you follow certain people, right. So the stuff you see in your fee list from the people you follow. In those lists what you didn't see, is cause of course we had this discussion and two routes we can go. Right now, what we do is we give you the top five in that list globally.
So that could be for example if its the best movie ever. It will probably very quickly become fairly irrelevant. It's going to be on the IMDP list right? But then what we show you are also all the answers that the people you follow gave. So we show you the global vote viewing. We mix in what, you know, the people you follow set.
Of course we can be more explicit in the long run. This is one of the things we have to figure out and just have a sort of a toggle between world and your friend, right? But we also do see what's kind of interesting is sort of the topical graph on top of it. Which works quite well. It gets very neeshy.
You know of course the best movie ever it gets boring pretty fast, but what we see people branch out into the things like; the best sci-fi movie of the seventies, the best movie with Robert Deniro. So it's kind of interesting how people kind of paths emerge, where if things become too mainstream they just get more specific.
Right? You can almost see that happening in different topics. and we can still always filter it by the social graph of course.
And of course your feed is all only people that you know.
What about context? I mean for this to become more than you know, a once in a while thing that someone would register on their iPhone. Do you guys feel that the items that they're voting on or making statements on need context around them, metadata that's already about the object? About the restaurant, or about the show, or is it just the words?
Right, right. I think that's of course one of the most asked features by people. So, of course what we gonna do is, if you have a place you can click on the place you know and you see context around it. Where is it? So a lot of times you see items you don't know. So you know a little bit more. If you think about music for example, basically this is, you know, the play list is already there.
We have, you know, things like the best summer song this year. And so you know that is basically your play list. In the future you might just be able to press play. And there is like an amen button then for example on sound cloud, where you can amen a song and then you know, basically it has the link to the okay.
I want to break to song. And you can just basically play it. I want to bring Mike in for you. Do we have enough time? So, Michael?
Sure, so I think what you're doing in keeping it simple and allowing people to participate in that way is great. The question I have is, how do you start to build? And I think this is what Jim was getting at as well. How do start to build to get enough users around this? They started to use us more than kind of just asking a question on Twitter or posting a status on Facebook.
What interesting thing are you guys doing? I didn't quite catch the question. Sorry, your mic wasn't on. The question is, what are you doing to build kind of more people actually using the service? Your service versus just posting a question on Twitter. Okay.
Well, I think what we already seen, witnessed with, there are certain services that you use for certain things. So I think once you start using Amen whenever you hear yourself saying a sentence with, like oh my God this is the best taco ever. Or this is the worst actor of all times. You pull out Amen.
We've actually seen it, right? Andthe other trigger is you get pulled back in. People dispute you, right? And the cool thing is because it's structured, people dispute something that you said years, months ago you know? So it doesn't just go away in the feed but basically, people see a list and they dispute something that you said two months ago and it pulls you back in and says, you've just been disputed.
This guy says you're wrong you know, and says, this is the right thing. So its kind of neat how old data actually resurfaces because of the structured nature of the list.
Okay, we're totally out of time, so big round of applause for Amen. Which brings us to our last scheduled start up. But then of course we have the audience choice. Let's hope we move on as quick as we can. Yeah, the wine's going. A lot of little things going on here
Backstage interview:
There was a question towards the end about how you get people...how you draw them away from a site like Twitter. Can you expand upon that a little bit more?
Sure, it's a destination on the web. Similar to how you go to Instagram to post photos, Facebook to share with your friends, we are basically the opinion platform where you come to share your opinion.
Overall, how do you think the judges responded to your product?
I think they got that it was very simple. They understood the easiness of the product. I think the questions were right on. I mean, this is the kind of question I would have asked us too. I think they got it.
Any final thoughts?
Yeah, we're just excited to keep going in the competition and come out of private beta.
