We just launched our social networks public beta
Hello everyone,
after reading indiehackers silently for month we just finished our first milestone and release our app in the playstore. The app is called "busnomads" and it is a social network for people living in vans, busses and rvs. With the app we try to connect these people better than the current solutions (facebook groups, subreddits or other social networks).
We did not made a lot of advertisement yet, but we plan to create some posts in a few facebook groups, subreddits and forums. Maybe we will try to cold email some popular blogs and youtubers. We also plan to visit local meetups of vanlifers to promote and speak about the app. Luckily we are part of this nomadic community for quite some time so we know the people and their problems quite well.
We are grateful for any feedback on the app, landingpage or advertisement strategy.
More informations can be found on our website: https://busnomads.org/
Hey @jelto , good job for this first release. Do you plan to add news feed and messaging features? Look at MySocialApp.io which is turnkey social network SDK for iPhone and Android.
Thank you for the kind words and the link.
One of our next releases will add messaging features for better communication and less dependency on e-mail/phone/other messengers. We already use Firebase Cloud Messaging for the "ping"-function. The text messaging will be done with Firebase as well.
A news feed is not on our short term backlog. So our usecase for MySocialApp.io is limited, but I will keep that in mind.
We also provide a feature called "RideShare" which brings geo live tracking to your app. You can take a look here, here and here. This is done in real time and link can be shared with people having or not your app.
It's cool that you are part of the nomadic community. That means you have more insights about what people want and what problems they face.
For instance, I've always made an assumption that people living in vans / busses / RV's travel in small groups already and kind of just want to hang out with their own group versus look for other people while on the road.
Is this just meant to be a side project, or do you plan to monetize someday?
Cheers,
Jonathan
Thank you for the comment! In the long term we plan to monetize the app with paid/premium features. But before that our focus is on developing all the basic functionality and getting more users, because we as a social network depend on active users.
Makes sense. How do you define active user for your product?