New Technology Opens the Door to Youtility Variations

Excerpts from: Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

by Jay Baer

Several of the companies profiled in this book have chosen mobile applications as a primary way to manifest their usefulness. This is, of course, one example of how technology shifts require you to treat these efforts as a process, not a project. Angie’s List has lived through several shifts of this type, going from a small, neighborhood directory to a telephone service to a full-featured website and mobile application. Here’s one of my favorite instances of technology altering the format of Youtility and providing newfound depth and relevance.

Cloth is a mobile application that makes it easy to save, categorize, and share your favorite outfits. Developed in December 2011 by Wray Serna and her boyfriend, Seth Porges, a former editor at Maxim and Popular Mechanics, the genesis of the idea came from Serna’s habit of taking pictures of herself wearing outfits she planned to pack on trips.

“I asked, ‘Wray, what are you doing?’” recalls Porges. “She said, ‘Whenever I have an outfit I like, I take a picture of it and save it for later so I can remember it.’ I realized that people have hundreds of articles of clothing and ensembles and it all fits together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.”

Porges also recognized that the majority of the photographs people take of themselves wearing clothes are shot with a mobile device, creating a haphazard and chaotic storage system, with many of the photos never to be seen again.

“That’s where Cloth came about,” Porges says. “The idea of ‘All right, how can we create the first utility that allows you to hold onto the photos of the outfits you like, and then do things with them once you have them?’”

This concept of Youtility, serving the needs of the clothing owner, are unusual in this category, according to Porges, who bemoans the litany of mobile applications and websites created by fashion brands and clothing retailers for the sole purpose of advertising and direct promotion.

My mom would absolutely love Cloth, and as soon as she buys a smartphone, I’m installing it. A former teacher, she’s a clothes and shoes buff, who set out each school year to never wear the same outfit twice. She logged it all in a tiny notebook throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties. I can hardly fathom the mindshare Cloth would have freed up for her.

The customer-centric nature of Cloth has served the company well, and it has received glowing press in the fashion and technology communities. Despite its initial success, Cloth wasn’t finished. In June 2012, they launched a new version that incorporated a live feed from weather-data provider Wunderground. This allows the Cloth app to not only organize your outfits, but also recommend them based on real-time meteorological conditions and future weather forecasts. It’s an entirely new layer of Youtility, enabled by the combination of two technologies. Being able to look at all of your “comfy” outfits on your phone and select one while still in bed (in theory), is interesting. Doing so and then having the app tell you to not wear a scarf because it’s supposed to be 80 degrees is far more intriguing. There’s nothing like being admonished by your mobile gadgets.

The Cloth app remains free, with the weather feature costing ninety-nine cents as an in-application upgrade. Users certainly don’t seem to mind, as Cloth carries a 4.5 average rating (out of 5) in the Apple iTunes store. The company created an excellent overview video (ar.gy/cloth), explaining the new weather feature.

“Cloth is not done and probably never will be done,” says Porges. “Technologies change, people change, users change, and you have to be there to adapt to it or else you will be making cassettes when the CD comes around.”

Good Ideas Don’t Have an Expiration Date

The third reason why Youtility must be a process, not a project, is that while good Youtility is better than no Youtility, great Youtility isn’t easy. You can’t schedule greatness, and it doesn’t respond well to deadlines and ultimatums.

Greatness comes from perseverance, which takes time. And it comes from inspiration, which can come at any time, from anybody. By making helpful marketing a never-ending part of your company’s cultural DNA, you enable greatness to emerge whenever and however it can. This is the spirit that fostered RunPee, perhaps the most useful application yet devised (for moviegoers, at least).

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Dan Florio is a character. Formerly a programmer for Microsoft Xbox, he grew up in the historic mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, and went to college at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He spent most of his freshman year money on a Dell laptop, and could only afford living in a tent near campus for a year. He made pocket money by modeling nude for the art department. He studied abroad in Wales and spent a few years working in math and astronomy at the University of Arizona (my alma mater). Oh, and he’s a trained massage therapist. You want to have a beer with Dan Florio.

In 2005, while watching the more-than-three-hour, full-length, Peter Jackson–directed version of King Kong with his wife, Jill, Dan Florio mentioned aloud that it would be great to have a website that listed the parts of a movie during which you could use the restroom without missing any key scenes. Research determined that such a site did not exist, so he built RunPee.com, where you can determine with second-by-second precision when are the best times to dash out to the bathroom during a movie. The site’s tagline is: “Because Movie Theaters Don’t Have Pause Buttons.”

The site, organized by movie title and release date, provides a helpful synopsis of the first five minutes of the film (if you’re running late). But the recommendations for “run pee” windows are the most useful feature. For example, in the movie Life of Pi, he suggests potential breaks at fifty-five minutes into the movie (a four-minute opportunity), at one hour, four minutes into the movie (for five minutes), and at one hour, twenty-one minutes (for three minutes). For each window, he provides a dialog cue, alerting you that it’s time to go. The mobile application on iOS, Android, and Windows phones is even better because you press one button when the film begins, and, when an opportunity occurs, your phone vibrates to let you know how much time you have. When you return, the website or mobile app provides a surprisingly detailed synopsis of what you’ve missed. RunPee also tells you if anything happens after the credits, as more and more filmmakers are using that time as a creative appendix or afterword. It’s an app that is most definitely worth ninety-nine cents.

RunPee is a family affair. Dan Florio, his mother, and his sister still see and review every movie. Determining the “pee times,” as he calls them, isn’t as easy as you might think:

“We have to sit in the movie theater and take notes. It tends to be hard to do pee times for character-driven movies because every scene is important to the development of the character. Whereas, in an action movie, there’s a car chase scene and that’s a pee time because, well, there’s five other car chase scenes that are better than this one.”

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