Traction for a social app to connect in real life after 100K pitch competition
Hey Indie Hackers, we just pitched a social product that does away with maximizing attention and collecting personal data. The app blurs your friends posts when you haven’t talked to them in real life for a few weeks. The aim is to keep you better in touch with your close friends by having quality interactions outside the screen.
The feedback we got from the competition is that we lacked traction. What advice do you have to gain traction pre-funding for a social app? We’re trying to be active on HN and other communities
We believe to win users trust the next generation of social apps will not monetize users attention or data, and align their incentives with users well being.
www.reelfriends.app
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Come for the tool, stay for the network https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the-network
Is there some way you can provide value to users without all their friends being on it? Pair with strangers while your userbase is still small?
Thank you, that’s a great resource on how to go about addressing the Network Effect, we’re thinking of ways this could add value to the users without having them invite their friends to the network. Making it a sort of CRM for your most important relationships is one of them.
that sounds like a good idea. get a notification if you haven't spoken to friend X in Y days. then eventually when friend X joins as well you can track it automatically or something like that
Have you read the story of how Tinder got its user base? I think there’s a collection of lessons from them you could adopt.
My own personal opinion: As a well-educated tech consumer, I really don’t see data monetization as a big enough deterrent to change my own personal habits. Others will certainly disagree, but if the data privacy is your key differentiator, I believe there’s a sizable portion of the population that won’t care enough to switch unless all their other friends have already switched.
I haven’t read the Tinder story, but I am curious to check it out. Monetizing data is only one side of how social media incentives are not aligned with users best interest, the other less talked about side is monetizing attention and the kind of interactions it creates: social comparison, competition for likes, followers, hordes of acquaintances that makes it impossible to build intimacy. If you really think about it, all of these features are made to drive attention, in a way social media as we know it is built for advertisers not natural human interaction for users. Our goal is to evolve social media to something humane.
If like many users we talked to, you feel your online social interactions leave you feeling hollow. Maybe this could be for you? And you don’t need to add your thousand “friends“ on it, it’s just for the closest ones that matter. In fact, we’re limiting how many people you can add to it based on the Dunbar number.
I totally understand the pitch and certainly agree with the science behind your logic. My big questions here really boils down to these:
I'm just one person on the internet that doesn't use a ton of social media anyway, but from a product perspective, these some of the questions I'd be trying to get answers to if I were building this. Since I'm not, I figured I'd ask you! I'm interested in the concept for many reasons, even if I'm not the target audience.
Thank you, these are all great questions we should be asking
These are certainly good questions thank you! I am a member of Sido's team, and I became involved because though I have a presence on social media, I do find it very ridiculous just how attention-driven these apps are.
I used to find myself scrolling through my feed for hours, and never felt any satisfaction or sense of a good use of my time. Because of this, I have more or less completely stopped scrolling through my feeds and thus feel less connected to my close friends who live back in my hometown (since I am at college), etc.
This is very specific to my use case, but after the few ethics and computer science courses I have taken, I have found out that many others have this same problem. Thank you so much for the feedback, and hopefully my use-case (and similar ones I have seen through my classes) can give more evidence to it being a large issue.
Hi! I am building a social commerce platform and completely second your thoughts on providing value to the user upfront without backend downsides. Traction is definitely our biggest challenge to, but I am thinking through how to locate and infiltrate the niche-est target market possible. I.e. not just considering demographics but also psychographics: how can you find the group of 26-year-olds living in Brooklyn with an interest in yoga and deep pockets and show up to their meetups and get them to refer to one friend at a time?
I checked Dendwell. I like to idea of showing furniture in real spaces. What's the social aspect of the platform?
What evidence do you have, based on user behavior, that "keeping in better touch" and "not monetizing users or data" are pain points for users?
Users saying these are pain points is not evidence that they are.
I am not sure I follow your second point..
You guys got an MVP? With a social network I imagine it's gonna be pretty difficult to prove traction using email pre-launch sign ups like it looks as though you're doing on your site. If you asked people if they need another social network I'd assume 99% of them would say no (as maybe they would have done pre Instagram/Snapchat etc) - people only feel like they want them when all their friends do too.
Part of me feels as though the more social networks/media apps that pop up the less likely it is that people will add others they don't speak to much. For example I imagine you have more people on Facebook you don't speak to often than Snapchat - purely because it's an older platform, so I'm not sure if it would work amazingly but I may be wrong.
I'd personally recommend using a platform like Adalo or Glide Apps to push out some form of simple MVP, targeting a small group of people like Facebook targeted Harvard students. Maybe that would give you a better idea of traction?
Those are certainly good points. I agree that people will likely not be immediately accepting of a new platform, and the phenomenon of only adding people you frequently speak with to a new platforms exists (i.e. your Facebook->Snapchat example). However, I find that hopefully people (especially in niche markets such as people who are freshly graduated, families members geographically far from other family, etc.) will be able to accept this platform more, since it is focused on connection rather than attention. Also, the phenomenon you mentioned would actually be incredibly beneficial to our platform, since it is focused on small friend groups and people you care crucially about staying connected to, rather than every friend you have. Thanks so much for the feedback and great observations!
I completely understand that the world does not need another social app. Our angle is different. We’re not trying to be the next cool social on the block. We want to build a sensible product that remedies to the flaws brought with the web2.0 social apps. We win when you feel better in touch with the people that matter to you. While the current apps win pushing out polarizing content, false facts, popularity contexts, all good ways to get attention but also harmful to us as individuals and community.
Thanks for recommending Glide and Adalo. I’ve user Invision for mokeups but these seem to go further.
I am a teammate working on this project with Sido. Any questions are welcome!