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Show HN: What do you think of my new social app?
Hey there,
First time posting on Hacker News in about 2 years! The reason I’m posting is that I thought I’d write about the product I’ve been building, in hopes it resonates with people.
Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour, including mine and my friends.
I also noticed that the vast majority of my friends were pretty much passive on the services, even if they had an account. Turns out that most people felt uncomfortable sharing to people they didn’t know too well, which inevitably happens as you meet new people, add them, and often don’t develop the relationship much further. I had a sense that there could be a better way.
In that, I remembered the days of Path and Google+ which had the model of focusing on particular people in your network, both through the feed and in how you shared. Path in particular was a ‘real life’ social network, something that despite being brought to market in 2010 or whatever, seemed to be more relevant today.
So problem found, problem solved. I took the journey of learning how to code when COVID hit (I was working in Architecture and Design and was about to start my masters degree at Harvard GSD in Boston), then one thing led to another, my prototype garnered some investment interest, and Circles was born.
The idea is very much like the name suggests, it’s about adding your contacts (synced through your phonebook) into Circles that define what the relationship is. This means that you only see things from people you have tagged (rather than everyone) and when you share, you choose exactly who it goes to (rather than all your friends or followers).
It also takes cues from other privacy focused social products. Posts are encrypted, reactions and comments are only shown to people who are contacts with eachother, and user profiles only show that which has been explicitly shared to the user viewing the profile.
As they were mentioned briefly before, it’s essentially a crossover between Path and Google+ with a wrap around layer of privacy, so the potential revenue has to eventually come through paid features rather than ads.
We’re in the app store and google play store (yay, cross-platform JS frameworks), the invite code is ‘FULLCIRCLE’ and download links are below:
Landing: https://oncircles.com https://oncircles.com
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/circles-share-more-with-less/id1532621483 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/circles-share-more-with-less/i...
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oncircles https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oncircles
I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on the idea. Hit or miss?
PS: If you want to chat about the idea or are interested in working together I’d love to chat. Always interesting to meet people on HN and we have the funds, ideas and drive to continue making cool things that can solve big problems. Send me an email at james@oncircles.com
Thanks!
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI guess it follows what I was thinking to do if I ever made my social app, it's also a way of socializing that is especially useful for people who often socialize via 'projects', so work or other things that they are doing, and the people they are doing stuff with are their friends, separated on a project basis generally.
- jstrafy 5y agoThanks for the comment! Found that years of studying and working in Architecture and Design that I shared my work online maybe 2 times so it was that thinking that formed a lot of the architecture. If you share different things with different people, why not have the same mechanism online? I guess the question we're trying to answer now is whether we narrow in on creating a more intimate social network for regular use or create a type of social-email hybrid for this exact use case.
- dewey 5y agoThanks for sharing! I think the idea is great (Usually new social media networks have some good underlying idea) but how are you going to overcome the massive hurdle of getting people to join a new social media network? Many people says they "hate" social media, in reality everyone is still using it and it's very hard to even convince people (even close family) to use another messenger even though the barrier is way lower than a social network.
- ricokatayama 5y agothat’s a key question. OP mentioned Path (which was an incredible product), but probably they struggled with the acquisition. One of the super powers in a social network is the network effect and OP need to understand how to overcome that.
- jstrafy 5y agoThanks for the comment! I think it's a great question, the hypothesis with Circles is that a vast amount of people would like to share online but don't because of the dynamics of these other social apps make them uncomfortable. So in that the hurdle has been overcome because people are able to share content and interact in ways that they 'can't' do elsewhere. There's also a group of people (like myself) who avoid typical social media, so downloading a different solution is less of a hurdle because it's designed for them. However, you point about people 'hating' social media yet still using it is well and true. It's almost like fruit vs mcdonalds, everyone would prefer to be an avid fruit eater and have control of their diet, but few do in the end. In that we believe the only moat for social networks is providing utility that other networks can't - YC wrote a really good blog post on this in relation to WeChat (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3t-how-wechat-grew-to-be-the-1-app-in-the-world https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3t-how-wechat-grew-to-be...). We're obviously not there yet but it's a start. Also, if looking for a solution to that messaging problem, Beeper and Texts.com are creating something exciting there. Perhaps the social media equivalent of these services will be enabled by interoperability by DeSo, ETH or the like. Interesting to think about.