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Social Strikes Back
by
Rosie Sherry
https://a16z.com/social-strikes-back/
I worked for the "word-of-mouth" startup for a couple of years, when I started it was called "Digital Animal" and the focus was on recommendations/social sharing/brand-consumer relationship and rewards. Then the company was rebranded and it shifted towards helping enterprises modify their outdated sites on-the-fly in short time with JavaScript, like AB testing, and the social side was kind of forgotten. Maybe exploring social in more creative ways and working on helping businesses to build communities or something like would've been another option.
@rosiesherry @mattkandler absolutely fascinating topic! Anyone else thinking about launching a startup in that space? Would love to exchange ideas on this!
Thanks for posting this @rosiesherry!
Are any other Indie Hackers working on a form social networking? I know it's pretty intimidating for a solo founder but I think there's ways to make it manageable.
I'm working on ideas related to 'community digital gardens'.
Anything with "garden" in it sounds fun to build! Would it be like a place to showcase and/or collaborate on projects together?
It'd be cool if there was a way to share the benefits of products or even bundle them - like a farm box for indie projects!
I'm not sure what it will be at this stage tbh, just have 'community digital gardens' stuck in my mind these days.
I naively made a social network as my very first web-app project... of course, it was more work than I'd expected and now it's largely unmaintained.
It was fun to build though, and it confirmed my hypothesis that social network interactions could be more positive and unmoderated if the social focus is put on the creation, rather than consumption of media.
That's a really important insight and especially useful for any small social app that isn't going to have an army of moderators like Facebook and Google. I've noticed similar things in the mental health space - if the app has a positive focus, most of the social interactions will also.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
Audio and voice do seem to be getting all the attention lately but have to admit I don't love any of them yet (Clubhouse is very interesting though)
My best tips would be (1) to be super patient and (2) to try as many experiments as possible without getting too attached. I built a "send thanks" feature a couple of years ago to text friends "thanks" from the app, but it didn't do well so I removed it. That led to the current social features that are actually getting engagement!
(Sorry to reply so late too, didn't see a notification for the comment!)