CEO Seth Priebatsch tells all.
SCVNGR might look like a relatively recent entrant to the social location space, competing with services like Foursquare, MyTown and Gowalla. Actually, though, that's not the case.
On one level, SCVNGR lets people check-in at real-world locations, just as they do in Foursquare. But its raison d'etre is for brands and retailers to build content on top of that, in the form of challenges and treasure hunts - or 'treks'.
Among those to recently announce SCVNGR treks are TV firm Showtime - for its drama Dexter - the New England Patriots, and the Boston Globe newspaper.
"We spent our first year focusing exclusively on the enterprise market," explains CEO Seth Priebatsch.
"It was a critical part of our strategy, but meant we were a little more quiet when it came to consumer-facing news. Our goal is to try to build the game layer on top of the world."
SCVNGR started life as Priebatsch's project at Princeton University, but has now expanded to a business employing more than 65 people. Despite its gaming focus, Priebatsch says SCVNGR's focus on businesses was a logical decision.
"For online social networking companies like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, all the content is locked up in people, so it's important to get lots of people and connections," he says.
"Location-based social media has a bifurcated problem though. While you need consumers to engage with the content, there is also a huge amount of content that's not locked up in humans, but locked up in businesses, whether that's Joe's Coffee, local museums, coffee shops, universities or whatever."
It's a sensible point, explaining SCVNGR's decision to sign up lots of businesses before pushing its app out to consumers.
That said, rival social location services are catching onto the need for this kind of data too: witness Booyah's use of Google Places to ensure it has accurate business listings for its launches outside the US.
"We went from zero to 1,000 enterprises building challenges in a year," says Priebatsch. "We had Harvard, MIT, the US Navy, the New England Patriots, Warner Bros, Journeys right down to Joe's Coffee and Boston Burritos. These companies and institutions have adopted us as their game platform, and now we want to offer it out to the wider world."
In other words, SCVNGR hasn't just come from nowhere: it was just forging all these relationships quietly before starting to shout about its consumer service. Priebatsch says that even now, the company is adding 20-25 businesses a day to its platform.
For now, SCVNGR is staying tight-lipped about its user numbers, although announcements are expected in the coming weeks on that score.
In terms of usage, Priebatsch says SCVNGR is somewhere between Foursquare, with its quick check-ins, and MyTown, with its gaming focus encouraging people to spend more than an hour a day using it.
"We're nowhere near that, and we're very explicitly not trying to get anywhere near that," he says. "Hitting a button on your phone just to check-in is a little boring, but if we really want to be a casual shortform game, we've got to make our interactions quick and fast."
Back to those brands though: how is SCVNGR pitching itself to them, versus its social location rivals, who are all trying to entice brands to spend money on promotions with them?
Priebatsch cites two key attractions for SCVNGR. First, its platform is flexible, allowing brands to create a range of customised challenges for users to complete. Second, it works closely with them to ensure those challenges are effective.
"We'll say 'We have some really powerful tools for you to use, but tell us what type of people you want to engage with and where they tend to go'," he says. "'What's your demographic and where are they?' And we'll work with them to script challenges that make sense. We get very involved with the brand, to make sure the campaign is fun."
Priebatsch contrasts this with what he describes as Foursquare and Gowalla's more "laid-back approach", which he thinks keeps brands more at arm's length.
"We're saying 'Man, you're Dexter! You have the coolest content, and we can take that content and work with your audience to make challenges on SCVNGR, and pull in our game team to make it awesome!'" he says.
"We want everything to be a little different: we don't want the Dexter badge and the New York Times badge and the Patriots badge, as it eventually gets a little old. After you unlock the 17th custom badge, you know what to expect."
During ME's conversation with Priebatsch, he mentions the idea of 'style guides' - how SCVNGR defines what's appropriate and what's not for brands using its platform.
How does that work? "We have fairly sensible style guides, and our big one is if it's not fun, then don't do it," he says.
"But we do define that a bit more granularly. A brand might say 'my challenge is to come to my store and buy a donut', but that's not very fun! That's overt commercialism lightly disguised as a game. It will offend our users, but also it will make the brand look bad. That's not how SCVNGR is meant to work."
Priebatsch says that SCVNGR sometimes has to hammer home this message, and even turns down big-budget marketing campaigns because of it.
"Some brands don't get it: we turn down a lot of money every month - minimum six figures - because brands want to do campaigns that we think are completely contradictory to the ecosystem that we are trying to build."
What's the business model for this? Any SCVNGR user can build their own treks on the platform - with an update this week allowing them to do it from the mobile app as well as from the company's website.
However, businesses building larger scale challenges who want analytics can sign up for SCVNGR's premium service.
"They pay us for that, and the money is very good, but it's a side-effect of the ...
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"We want them to make the commitment to make SCVNGR awesome at the places they're choosing to build on it. It's not advertising - and thankfully we have never come close to having to resort to an advertising business model."
It's obligatory when talking to a company like SCVNGR to ask about the growing interest in social location from big beasts like Google, Facebook and Twitter - particularly with rumours this week suggesting Facebook will soon launch its own check-in based geolocation service.
Priebatsch doesn't mince his words. "For those services who are strictly based around the check-in, Facebook, Twitter and Google jumping in is going to be very destructive," he says.
"As a community, we tend to want to think that this will raise all our ships, and it will in the long term. But if your core value proposition is just the check-in, and you get some massive players who introduce - let's face it - exactly the same feature, it's going to be devastating."
Priebatsch doesn't mention any specific services in this regard, although there is no shortage of industry experts currently suggesting that Foursquare is most vulnerable to the location moves of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
"We've build ourselves around the game layer and the challenges, so we are super-excited about Google, Facebook and Twitter helping us to federate that information out into the world," he says.
"For people with a strong value proposition, it's going to be okay, but the entry of these players will do a little bit of cleaning house for those who don't."
Meanwhile, when asked what the greatest challenge facing a company like SCVNGR is, Priebatsch cites the 'education/integration problem' - by which he means ensuring all the employees of businesses using SCVNGR know what it is and how it relates to them.
"You can walk up to a cashier in a store and show them the reward on your phone, and sometimes they'll say 'Great!', but sometimes they'll say 'Huh? Why are you showing me your phone?', even though that business has created the challenge," he explains.
"There's still that education problem, but it's something we're well placed to solve."
As you may have guessed, Priebatsch is bullish about the future for SCVNGR - the word "awesome" crops up repeatedly during ME's interview.
"Things are going phenomenally well," he says. "We're in one of those fun situations where every week, we end up breaking every metric we've ever set. Everything has just been going up and to the right really fast. We're pretty excited."
