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Apply HN: Low-friction social organization between friends

5 points by tobyjsullivan ↗ HN
Imagine yourself watching the clock at the end of a long Thursday in the office trenches. Happy hour is calling your name but nobody in the office is up for going out today. What do you do?

People have a very real, fundamental need to socialize with other people on a regular basis. Can this need in fast-paced, ever-busier urban lifestyles be served by technology in a more convenient way?

What if there was an app on your phone that would let you know, within minutes, if any of your friends were nearby and interested in hanging out?

We would like to propose a platform which follows the “low-friction” trend (proven by the likes of Snapchat and Tinder) and enables rapid, last-minute, high-quality social organization.

How it works: When you’re bored, you simply open the app and hit the giant red button (it might say something like “Who’s up for hanging out?”). A notification is sent to all of your friends with whom you are connected in the app and who are within a certain radius (say, 2kms).

Each friend can choose to declare themselves “in” or “busy” (or just ignore the notification). As friends elect to be up for hanging out, everyone is added to a group chat to coordinate. Even friends who are not directly connected will be able to communicate at this point.

It’s the quickest, easiest way to meet up with your friends on short-notice.

Revenue:

Our primary revenue source is expected to be modern, context-aware advertising. Knowing that a group of friends in a particular area want to socialize, it is a logical pairing that we could recommend places to meet up. This offers high-value advertising opportunities for establishments in the area of the users.

Does it have a name? Not yet. Suggestions welcome.

Who are we? A couple Canadians with a passion for building software and solving problems. We each have years of experience building software for both enterprise and consumer applications.

3 comments

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azhuesing
Try using "Down to Lunch" for a week. It hit my campus very hard, and a lot of people actually used it (very close to hitting a critical mass in my opinion). But after some time, the app sucked. Here's why: I have different "tiers" of friends-- a core group I can eat with every day like family, acquaintance who I can eat with a few times a month, and the people I pretend to like & reluctantly get dinner with when asked. Ultimately it was this last group that made me delete the app. I'd rather just spend the time and text everyone I care about because 1) I avoid that awkward last group and 2) it shows the other two groups I care about them. And to go on a tangent, this is actually really important to keep up a relationship with acquaintances. And, in practice, I already have group chats with my core friends.

I'm not saying this is a bad idea, but I'd highly recommend you use DownToLunch and consider my feedback. Push-to-Hangout apps sound convienent but they don't add much value in practice. In fact, DTL's constant notifications were so bothersome I deleted the app.

tobyjsullivan
Out of curiosity, was this primarily a result of just being connected with too many people in DTL? Do you think you may have had a better experience if you weren't connected to that last group at all?

Along those lines, since it "hit the campus hard," did you feel social pressure to add everyone instead of just people who you'd actually want to hang out with?

We predicted these problems to an extent and have been formulating some options to deal with them but were hoping we could hold off that part. Good to hear some feedback around the issue. Thanks!

buss
I had the same initial thought about friend tiers. Could maybe be solved by electing to broaden the circle out as you hear back from closer friends?