Feedback: Our First Project on Indie Hackers, Circles!
Hi iIndie hackers!
After lurking on this awesome website for a couple years and being inspired by so many of your stories and projects, I’m excited to finally share a project of my own. For the past couple weeks my co-founders and I have been working on a mobile application called Circles, and we're looking for feedback from our fellow Indie Hackers.
Circles is a social media app that is trying to reimagine how we connect online.
The problem we’ve observed with social media today is that there's a lack of genuine interactions. People tend to post their highlights or present themselves in the most ideal way, which isn’t always accurate. As a result our timelines are filled with content and interactions that are so disconnected from the way we socialize in real life.
Circles is attempting to address this problem by building a platform where people feel comfortable interacting in genuine and authentic ways. How do we do that?
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We’ve rethought how ‘followers’ work. On Circles, you don’t have a traditional followers system, instead you have ‘circles’. Each user can have many different circles where every circle is a different subset of friends. This allows the app to have more granularity when defining who gets to see what you’re about to post, which will ultimately encourage more genuine interactions on our platform.
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We’re moving away from traditional social media’s tendency to publicly display metrics like likes and follower counts. Publicly displayed reaction systems encourage users to post specific types of content that will maximize these metrics, and we think that works against having authentic interactions online. One way we’re looking into changing reactions on social media is having users react by applying what color they feel best represents a post. This will show a gradient of the aggregate color of the post, and allow users to still feel validation that their post is still being seen without having them feel validation by seeing how many likes or hearts they got on the post.
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Horizontal timeline. We are trying to solve the problem of how the infinite vertical scroll UI of traditional social media, nudges users to go on autopilot and scroll mindlessly through their timeline. By having a horizontal timeline, and showing content one post at a time, it allows for a more engaging experience with the content.
We’re currently in the development phase, but you can check out our mockups here: https://www.figma.com/proto/ltL2giSIWGQqakSwXrZM0r/Circles-V1?node-id=1%3A247&scaling=scale-down
We’ve also launched a landing page, join our mailing list if you’re interested in learning more about the project @ usecircles.com
Any and all feedback on the idea, landing page, and mockups would be much appreciated!
Thanks guys!
Hey! Nice idea. I have some similar questions to @aciddrop's. What the difference between your app and Google Photos? Or some app where I can take pictures and share a private album with friends. Why would I use this app instead of Instagram? And how are you planning to get users? I think social media platforms are hard (from a business perspective) because they only make sense when many people use them. Maybe try to figure out that first before spending time developing? (just suggesting what I would do).
Hi @keyserfaty
Thanks for your feedback.
The differences between are app and Google Photos is that Google Photos was more for large photo dumps from parties or large gatherings, not for sharing a daily post or pictures like Circles is meant for. It also isn't native to your phone camera for iOS so you had to upload to their platform which worked against the convenience factor. Circles aims to be as user friendly as Snapchat, permanent and organized as google photos, and most importantly more intimate than instagram or any other major platform. We're still iterating on this day by day, but that is basis for Circles.
You're right about the difficulty of social media platforms, we're currently working to get more feedback and testing to try to validate that idea before we fully commit to developing.
I appreciate you taking the time to ask us critical questions, it's actually a big help. Let me know if you have other questions or need clarification on anything! Thanks @keyserfaty.
Hi there. Sounds interesting. I remember Google+ had a circles feature which connected groups of people with similar interests. Not that I ever used it much! Launching a new social media app is a challenging task in terms of user adoption, and I'm not really getting your USP at the moment. Yes, instagram sucks with people just posing for likes ... but that's also how things work in the real world imho, with people putting on their best side when out in public (and very different side when at home). So ... can you condense your 3 points into a single, one sentence elevator pitch?
p.s Your site isn't redirecting the www subdomain. https://usecircles.com/ works fine though
Hi @aciddrop ,
Thanks for your insightful comments!
You're absolutely right, Social Media apps are tough especially considering the current competition and the chicken and egg problem a platform like Circles would have. However we see potential in tackling the problem of superficial content/interactions as the conversation around this is becoming more and more mainstream. I feel that more and more people are becoming frustrated with this culture of posting highlights and trying hard to maximize the amount of likes. Social media shouldn't be a chore, it should simply be an extension of you social life. You shouldn't have to worry whether you have the perfect angle, filter, or caption.
As for your comment on Instagram likes and the real world, I would agree with you partly. Yes people do put on their best side In public, but when they're with certain people like friends and family, they share a more genuine side of themselves. What Circles is trying to do is allow people to share this genuine side on social media, by creating an environment where they feel comfortable doing so (e.g categorizing their friends into Circles so only certain people see certain posts). We also know that many people get validation through Instagram likes, and there's a conversation around how that effects ones mental health. With this in mind we decided to introduce a new system to react to posts, that isn't tied to a numeric value. Instead of likes, users on Circles can react to a post by picking a color that they feel represents the posts, represents how they feel, or any other reason they may have.
We then aggregate all the colors users reacted with, and display it on the post as gradient.
The user who made the post can also see which color each individual reacted with, so in theory they still receive some validation without the pressure that numerical metrics introduce.
Writing this post really made me think more about our USP, so thanks @aciddrop! Let me know if you have any further questions or need clarification, I want to make sure I'm getting this idea across well. Working on a one sentence pitch now!
Hey. Website with waiting list is not working for me.
Otherwise very interested to give your approach a try, very excited about it.
Drop me a DM when site is up
Hi @Kpavlovsky_pro ,
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, you can access the website @ https://usecircles.com/
I'm glad you're interested in Circles, its a work in progress but we feel that we're really on to something. Join our mailing list and I'll reach out when we have more to share, would love to have your feedback on this.
Cool. Just saw that it is for iOS only at first.
Well, I'll wait longer than others :-)