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Congrats! It's impressive to go from learning to code, to shipping a product with this level of polish, in less than two years. I tried to build essentially th

Congrats! It's impressive to go from learning to code, to shipping a product with this level of polish, in less than two years. I tried to build essentially the same thing on top of Matrix (and got rejected from YC in the process) - I haven't tried the app yet but I have some initial thoughts and questions. I really hope you succeed with this; forgive me if I come across as a skeptic. #1 question: every notable social app had some clever strategy and/or shenanigans to attract a critical mass. What's your plan to tackle the network effect problem? Maybe 10% of the value of a social app is the UX, the other 90% is that the people I care about are there. Are posts end-to-end encrypted, or encrypted at rest? Your video says E2EE but your landing page says encrypted at rest. There's no wiggle room for confused messaging on this. Your blog says you're using Matrix but one of your comments here suggests you abandoned that idea? If so, I'm curious to hear why. Are/were you sharing content directly in Matrix rooms, or storing encrypted content in an object store and using Matrix as a key sharing mechanism, or something else? Can you say more about the problems you encountered? The landing page design is slick, but there's too much motion pulling my attention all over the place, and too many red flags. The animation for "Automatic Contacts" evokes a feeling that you're going to swallow up my address book and send unsolicited requests to my friends as soon as I sign up. The alarm bell with red dot is an anti-pattern. It feels weird to see all the other social networks I can integrate into my profile, considering this is squarely aimed at people who have rejected those other apps. Your video says there are no ads, there never will be, and users are not the product. How, then, are you going to thrive in such an intensely competitive space?

jstrafy 5y ago
Thanks, it's been a journey and appreciate the kind words! Matrix is great, as I mentioned in one the replies, we were also building with the Ruby SDK and decided against in the end. Will update the site to reflect this & your comments. #1 Very true, the value is determined by the users and the content they bring to the app. Because you broadcast to a specific audience, we've designed Circles to be a place for sharing things that you don't share on chat or social media. So far this has encouraged people to invite their closest contacts to the app. We also have ideas for discovery and single player features that we're building. Since you applied to YC with your version, what were your ideas around solving the cold start? #2 Apologies for the mixed messages there! We finished the video whilst we were building on Matrix (E2EE) but our current stack has encryption at rest on our servers and anything you share in Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS. #3 Great points and I hadn't heard this feedback before - think that you have a point. #4 We are currently Angel funded but plan to continue to build Circles as a utility fuelled social network (as opposed to media), in this we will charge for premium features.

jstrafy 5y ago

Thanks, it's been a journey and appreciate the kind words! Matrix is great, as I mentioned in one the replies, we were also building with the Ruby SDK and decided against in the end. Will update the site to reflect this & your comments. #1 Very true, the value is determined by the users and the content they bring to the app. Because you broadcast to a specific audience, we've designed Circles to be a place for sharing things that you don't share on chat or social media. So far this has encouraged people to invite their closest contacts to the app. We also have ideas for discovery and single player features that we're building. Since you applied to YC with your version, what were your ideas around solving the cold start? #2 Apologies for the mixed messages there! We finished the video whilst we were building on Matrix (E2EE) but our current stack has encryption at rest on our servers and anything you share in Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS. #3 Great points and I hadn't heard this feedback before - think that you have a point. #4 We are currently Angel funded but plan to continue to build Circles as a utility fuelled social network (as opposed to media), in this we will charge for premium features.