About
Some people like to plan their social lives far in advance. I, on the other hand, prefer to leave my options open and make social plans spontaneously on the spur of the moment. This worked well in college where you could just walk down your dorm's hallway and get a group together to go do something in a moment's notice.
I soon learned that life after college isn't as spontaneous and getting a group together at a moment's notice can be a difficult process. I decided to try to fix this problem back in 2006, when I purchased the domain GrpQ.com and began setting up a group text/email messaging system based around getting groups together. A few friends signed up, but unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, it really wasn't used much. As a result, the site was put on hold until I could give it another shot.
Jumping forward to 2010, I started toying with the idea of relaunching GrpQ. Technology and service providers had advanced significantly since 2006 making it much easier to launch and run. I started brainstorming how to make the system simple and easy to use but powerful enough to handle any size group.
I ended up with a system where people can choose which groups they participate in. People can easily join and leave groups at a moment's notice. This seems so simple and obvious now, but when I was originally planning the system, it was much more complex. The original idea involved users setting up a profile (who needs another online profile) to manage their groups (and each user would have a unique set of groups).
Once I figured out the functionality, I had one more hurdle to cross. How do I make it sustainable on its own? I wanted the system to be open and easy to use without requiring people to pay money to use it. Unfortunately, there are costs involved with running servers and every single text message costs money. The larger a group gets, the higher it costs to send a text message to everyone in the group.
Trying to figure out an economically viable plan turned out to be very difficult (although the end solution, once again, seems very obvious). I knew that I didn't want the system running on ads and I knew that I didn't want to charge every user who just wanted to get text updates. Since I personally prefer a known fee with unlimited usage (versus getting charged for every single time I do something), I first started considering charging a small fee to people who sent messages out. This would work great on a small scale where the small fee would cover the outgoing messages. The problem is that if a group grows really large, the costs can quickly sky rocket and the small fee wouldn't come close to covering the costs.
The next idea built upon previous ideas and it involved limiting the size of groups and offerring different price plans for different size groups. The problem with limiting group sizes is that it limits the way the service can be used. The costs of the pricing plan would also grow very quickly because it costs a lot more to send a text message to 1,000 subscribers than it does to send to 10 subscribers. The pricing between a 10 user group and a 1,000 user group would make the 1,000 user group's pricing look outrageous.
Finally, I decided to just build the system for use with my own groups, and if somebody wanted to create their own group, I would charge them a monthly fee and they would get a certain amount of messages that could be sent out. The larger groups would just have to pay a much larger monthly fee.
I ended up getting the system up and running, but the payment system was still bothering me. As I was driving to meet some friends for lunch, I began thinking about the whole fee system. I didn't like what I had planned, but I couldn't figure anything else out. Then, it just kind of hit me out of the blue: Why not have everybody in the group pay for it optionally? If group messaging really provides a benefit, then the users can pay for it and if it doesn't provide much benefit, then the group will simply run out of messages that can be sent. Each group can figure out how they want to split up the costs and I can provide the group owners with tools to control who can use the group.
Which brings us to today. You are currently looking at the recently launched GrpQ.com website. A lot of things are still being worked out, but the service is up and running. If you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, or if you come across any bugs please use the contact form to let me know. I hope you find GrpQ to be a useful tool in planning your social life at a moment's notice.
- Anthony Paul Graddy
Last Updated: March 23, 2010
