GiddyUp Launches New App for Short-Term Plans
From Facebook to Foreca.st, friends can connect with each other via a multitude of social networks to plan last-minute get-togethers, so many would question the need for another app that helps people make plans. New app GiddyUp believes stand-alone solutions aren’t the answer, and is launching a free cross-platform iOS and Android app today to help people make plans without the hassle.

Co-founders Elliot Goldwater and John Zurbach both come from a finance background, and said the pain of organizing plans with friends over email, phone calls and text message, and social networks led them to build a new solution. “Between living in NYC and always wanting to be out and about, the endless email chains and the myriad of text messages flying back and forth was just too much to handle,” co-founder Elliot Goldwater said in an interview. “Everybody has experienced this and gone through the hassle … there needed to be an easier way.”

GiddyUp requires event hosts to sign up for the service, but they don’t need to add their friends from other networks. Goldwater says the app gets back to the basics by allowing users to add friends from their “truest social network” – their phone’s contact list. “These are the individuals … who you talk to in real life and rely on for plans on any given Friday night,” he added. “[However], GiddyUp is not another social network; we think you have enough of those.” That may be true, but it is worth noting that not everyone a person wants to invite to a get-together may be in their phone-based address book, especially given how popular Facebook is thse days.

Users create an RSVP-able event with details like the time, location and event name, and then invite friends from their phone’s contact list. Friends who are already GiddyUp members receive a push notification urging them to RSVP, and non-members receive an SMS with a link to a mobile web page where they can RSVP without signing up for the app. The app also features group chat, an attendance tracker for all participants, privacy controls, Facebook and Twitter integration, and calendar syncing.

Goldwater separates their competition into three specific categories: formal event planning tools like Facebook and Evite, preemptive check-in tools like Foursquare, and traditional communication tools like the telephone or SMS. Outside of larger tools like Facebook and Foursquare, there are several other startups tackling the short-term planning space, like Chime, Wendr and GonnaBe. He found these options were either time-consuming, socially awkward or chaotic. “We tried to take the aspects from each of our competitors that people appreciate the most and combine them into an incredibly mobile and easy-to-use platform,” he said. “Creating an event with GiddyUp … can be done anywhere and getting responses is easier … [you find out] exactly what the plan is and it answers the age-old question of ‘who else is going?’”

The bootstrapped company plans to implement a freemium model (though the apps are currently free), and Goldwater said right now they’re focused on user acquisition and improving the product. “As we expand our user base we’ve mapped out several potential revenue streams that we can implement at any given time,” Goldwater explained. After today’s launch Goldwater and his team intend to begin working on the GiddyUp web application. “It will be important to give our users the tools to plan their days whenever they want to,” he said. “The web application will be the gateway into the future for GiddyUp.”

While there may still be a pain point around organizing short-term plans with friends, startups like Connectsy and Plancast have attempted unsuccessfully to create stand-alone services. While GiddyUp isn’t trying to build a self-contained app ecosystem, it is asking users to add another service into their event planning arsenal, which could be a hard sell, especially if they’re asking users to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere.