In 2009 Waze began serving customers in Israel as an app for navigation based on real-time traffic data. Levine was the chief executive officer in charge of management, recruitment and raising capital. Shabtai was the chief technology officer, and Shinar was the vice president for research and development.
From the start, Waze benefited from network effects. The more people use it, the better it gets, which encourages even more people to join in. Some enthusiasts add or edit roads via computer, similar to the way people edit Wikipedia pages. I found one entry from Australia last month about a road that deteriorates from “reasonably graded gravel to a lengthy section of barely navigable farm track, with deep puddled tyre grooves and grass in the centre almost higher than our bonnet.” It added, “Please consider any possible means to demote this section from the way-finding algorithm.”
A way to help the Waze community that’s less time-consuming than map editing is to report roadside hazards and the like. But even those who do neither still contribute to Waze because the system learns from their anonymized GPS data how fast or slow the traffic is on their routes.
None of that happens without first getting to a critical mass, though. After succeeding in Israel, Waze turned on the app worldwide starting in late 2009. “It was simply not good enough — really, it simply sucked — except in four countries: Ecuador, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Latvia,” Levine wrote in the book. In Ecuador there was a strong local partner; Levine told me he’s not sure why it caught on in the other three countries. “Everywhere else,” he wrote in the book, “people would download the app, try it and give up.”
There is a long-running debate in tech over the concept of the minimum viable product. Engineers are willing to tinker with a pretty bad product if it’s interesting enough, but the general public is less tolerant. Release something that’s substandard, and you could alienate customers forever, one argument goes.
Levine doesn’t buy that. “The risk of you losing your customers is zero because you don’t have any customers. What are you going to lose?” he asked. He and his partners tried several times to start in the United States. “Each iteration was launched with the conviction that it’s going to work,” he said. The team learned from each failure. “What makes successful start-ups is the perseverance, the grit,” he said.
Waze’s fortunes in the United States got a boost from Carmageddon, when a section of Interstate 405 on the west side of Los Angeles was shut down for a weekend in July 2011 for a widening project. ABC7 Eyewitness News teamed with Waze to promote the app and update viewers on traffic snarls.
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