Launch HN: Revel (YC S19) – Community for Women over 50
We're two women in our 30s who decided to work on this problem after seeing how important and how challenging it has been for our mothers.
Lisa's mother raised her as a single parent while working as a public school teacher, and that meant that she didn't have much time to focus on her life outside of parenting. When Lisa left for college, her mother retired, and found herself longing for a community of like-minded women, which wasn’t easy. Alexa's mother is similar in need but different in circumstance: she's a physician with a high-powered career and a robust social life, living in a dense urban area, who nonetheless feels that she doesn't know where to turn for genuine connections with women her age.
In the United States alone, there are 50 million women like our mothers. They are a dramatically underserved demographic. We sometimes hear talk of "elder tech" and "silver tech" but our customer is not "the elderly"—she's in her 50s, 60s, or 70s, statistically healthier than ever before, with some disposable income to spend, and she wants to enjoy life alongside women her own age.
How Revel works is that any woman over 50 can sign up to join as a member for $15 a month. As a member, she can then browse our listings of Revel events being hosted by other members in her neighborhood. All of our events are user-generated and any member can apply to host at any time.
We're operating only in the Bay Area for now, but obviously our plan is to expand geographically as soon as it makes sense. Since we launched in late July, we've had hundreds of women sign up as members, and have had dozens of member-hosted gatherings in living rooms and backyard gardens across the Bay Area. If your mother, aunt, or family friend lives nearby, we'd love to meet her!
We'd love to hear your ideas and feedback and questions, and your own experiences in this area!
76 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 56.2 ms ] threadI'm not sure lack of a community is a problem for my mom - she's way more social than my dad and has no problem making friends. That being said, I'll let her decide for herself whether or not she needs this. I sent her links to this comment thread and your homepage. My mom rules, and if she finds a great friend through your service - well!
I know my dad never really had any friends. Luckily, he has 6 brothers and they're kind of close, so that's a decent substitute for friends. But only one of them has any friends. My mom has one brother. He never had any friends -- ever, even as a kid.
On the contrast, my mom has tons of friends. Her 3 sisters have WAY more friends than her. My dad's sisters all have tons of friends. My mom's female friends have tons of friends, too.
I personally don't know any older women who don't have friends. Even my Grandma who was 90 when she died had two friends left around her age! I get the irony here, btw -- if they didn't have friends how would I know them?
Anyway, I could see women wanting more connection with women their age. Who doesn't want more friends? But beside one of my uncles, I literally don't know a single man in that age group that has ANY friends -- regardless of age. And even he only has a few friends, and he's genuinely one of the coolest people I know. It's sad.
Sample size of one. I get it. I know you did your research. Just curious to learn more.
My suspicion is: women might just be more receptive to this kind of thing (which is the reason they actually need it less) because they're a lot more social than men. But I'd like to get your input.
My ex has discovered that spending 10 years living with your best friend easily leads to neglecting friendships, and more specifically neglecting to form new ones. She's currently without a local "best mate" to spontaneously hang out with/share with and misses that. I suspect she'd happily pay $15/mo to join a community of similar folk. But it would need to be physically local, if there's no face to face contact it's pretty pointless. Which means it's "like Meetup, but significantly more expensive"... what's the value proposition?
But I suspect there will be a fair bit of churn if the community works, because quite a few people will use it to find friends rather than maintain friendships. Might be worth building that into your financial plans.
Not true. I could tell from many women over 50 with lots of power and tons of man beyond 50 who lost everything.
Source: a few years short of the target range. I only have a few male friends, made 15-20+ years ago. In contrast, my wife goes to all sorts of female-only gatherings pretty much every week. Nominally they "paint" or "craft" something there, but I'm pretty sure she just goes there for the social environment and to talk.
Seems to me a service like this isn't really possible for older men, at least not in any of the countries where I lived.
Best of luck with it.
Regardless, best of luck. Definitely an underserved market.
The code errors themselves are minor, mostly missing alt tags and form labels. It would not take a lot of work to make the home page compliant, besides the color corrections which (always) present difficulty for the designers.
https://achecker.ca/checker/
https://wave.webaim.org
Adults tend to stop making friends after 30.
All your images are missing alt tags, which is accessibility 101.
The light pink text #E6989C on white #FFFFFF fails every contrast checker and is even hard for me as a young person to read.
Edit: I think you need bigger fonts (dates are 14px..nothing should probably be less than 18px), bolder font weights, deeper color contrast across the board.
[1]: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse
see https://youtu.be/lHBE0mIDTHk
screenshot https://i.imgur.com/kdzc26U.png
- your 404 page is returning a 200 status code instead of 404 (making it hard for Google to know what's a broken page)
- your server isn't compressing (i.e. gzip) any of the responses which will impact speed a lot.
- you have several broken external links e.g. one to chandlerdpethpsych.com
I used this Chrome extension (I'm the author) to crawl and find these issues if you want to check and confirm fixes:
https://www.checkbot.io
Not only it's bad and limits the market, but I'd guess many or most people who identify as a woman who want to go to social events would enjoy the company of people who do not identify as a woman, since people who are exclusively homosexual are a minority.
We're two women in our 30s who decided to work on this problem after seeing how important and how challenging it has been for our mothers.
Maybe they will change their minds at some point -- AKA pivot -- but this is the problem space that currently grabs them. Being interested in the problem you are trying to solve is an essential ingredient for success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation
As long as the experience is positive, people will return in the future if/when the need arises.
What I've found is that I tend to have "deep friendships" that activate when I am with friends, and what counts is remembering to go and visit the friends. Sure, if I need something I will ask and they will do whatever they can, but that's kind of the minimum possible relationship.
It feels a bit weird to message someone and say "I'm taking time off work to visit your city, specifically to hang out with you"... but it works, we both feel better for doing it, and it does actually help if we have something to do while we're together. So last week I went and helped put up a mezzanine in a friend's new factory, then went and helped organise another friend's shed. We also talked a bit about feelings, which is uncomfortable but also useful. And (obviously) a good dose of "I remember that I enjoy hanging out with you".
1. My friend Jeff Johnson has a book on designing for the older users. "Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population: Towards Universal Design" He lives in San Francisco if you want to contact him. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WPBK2V4/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
2. The Bay Area seems problematic for this age group because of rising housing prices. My non-technical friends are moving out of the area because they can cash out. My friends who are staying largely are technical or married to someone technical. I would target an area that seniors are moving into and need to meet new people rather than an area where seniors are leaving.
3. I am not sure how this is different than meetup. You would have to sell me to pay $15 a month when meetup is free until you want to host an event. Then it is $10 a month. And young people and men can come!
4. Most women are better at making and keeping friends than men. I actually do regularly hang out with friends that I have collected over the years.
5. I prefer mixed age groups.
6. I prefer mixed genders.
Will definitely contact Jeff Johnson -- thank you for the tip!
Granted, Meetup was purchased by wework so who knows where that is going.
We've asked our members why they join us and not Meetup or Facebook groups or other things that are out there. We hear two main answers: 1) there is a lot more trust/safety from this being a group just for women of this age, 2) Revel feels like more of a community, whereas on Meetup so much of the organizational burden falls on the group's one host.
Someone should make something similar for men though. Though, I would imagine it would be more difficult.
Men over 50 might the most fragile and underserved group out there (they have the highest suicide rate, etc).
Perhaps, at some point, you could launch a partner service just for older men?
If someone says "hey, there's this app to find a dog walker, and there's this app to find a gardener, and another to find a handyman, why not just make an app where people can select their proficiencies and set an hourly rate." I tend to prefer those ideas, as compared to someone saying "well I'm going to make an app that's like Amazon but instead we just sell healing crystals."
So your application is basically just Facebook Events, or Meetup, or Eventbrite, but for women who are over 50. You're moving away from the generalized platform in favor of specificity. Sometimes that just works, but it usually doesn't. The only way I think products like that can succeed is if
a.) the generalized/abstract platform is simply too abstract for people to even know that it services the specific use-case that a more honed application addresses directly. An example for this might be that even though someone could use an abstract platform like notion.so in order to keep track of their favorite wines/add pictures/notes/comments, the platform is so generalized that they simply are unaware of that potential use case. A wine app that lets you keep track of wine with pictures and comments may be exactly what this person needs.
b.) the generalized platform either contains too many unrelated features to this specific use case, and is bloated because of it, or it is unable to put in features specific to this use case because they are not generalizable enough to the rest of the platform. An example like this might be that Amazon has prime, grocery shopping, too many filters and wishlists etc, to the point that the "healing crystal" shopping application might benefit from simply discarding the bloat. Or to the other point, a house-plant shopping application might have additional filter criteria very specific to temperature/humidity/location tolerances etc, to such a degree of specificity that this criteria would simply not make sense to include in a platform like Amazon.
I think in your case, "b" is not a factor at all. The overlap between requirements for your application and any event-hosting application would be almost identical. So what you're essentially after is "a," where it would not even occur to enough women over 50 to use Meetup in order to arrange the kinds of events you're describing. And because of this, there is no network in place on the platform for that particular demographic. Whether or not this is the case, or your platform services a real need that exists but for the lack of a more specific platform, I have no idea. Best of luck to you, though.