Comparative Research
Topic: Making more meaningful connections with acquaintances or new people
We looked at 10 apps and divided them into 4 categories based how low-commitment vs high-commitment and whether they focus on existing friendships or new connections.
In the lower-left quadrant, we see many apps that are used for finding new people and getting connected to many users. These apps have very specific goals and try to onboard the population with a specific goal in mind such as Linkedin which is mostly for professional reasons and Bumble is for partner/friend finding. These apps rise from the expansion of the internet and remove geographical boundaries. However users on these apps face the paradox of choice as with an abundance of people they can choose from, they don’t feel as committed and often time are urged to move on to the next person.
In the upper-left quadrant, we see only Lunchclub which is focused on introducing new people to each other but needs them to schedule a video meetup together which asks for a higher commitment from participants, therefore, pushing users to be more selective of who they want to get connected to. One inspiration we got from both Marriage Pact and Lunchclub in designing our app was their strong algorithms in matching people and leveraging a lot of data in suggesting a person meet.
In the upper-right quadrant which is where a few of our strongest competitors are, Love Nudge and Marco Polo assist friends by giving them activities to do for spending time with each other. The core thesis of the apps in this quadrant is to serve people who already have strong relationships and they look for ways to bond even further, but they lack the focus on friendships that are fading away and some of the activities they suggest might get boring.
In the lower-right quadrant, we see apps that on the surface level are more similar to us such as DEX and Garden that both send reminders to stay in touch with friends. Their target customer segment is also similar to ours, friends that have known each other for a while but haven’t been in contact for a while. However, the problem with such apps is that they act like personal CRMs and are more one-sided with only one user managing the connection and getting reminders which really doesn’t promote bonding from both sides of a connection.
Our strength is we have borrowed inspiration from the strengths of the strongest apps in each quadrant to come up with something unique. Even though We target similar users to the lower-right quadrant but we propose higher commitment activities such as meals and we use matching algorithms to find free time on the involved parties’ calendar. We see an opportunity for strengthening friendships that are almost fading away (almost moved to the left side) by proposing chill activities such as coffee or meals for re-strengthening (moving them to the right side).
Wink
By Ni
Description: An phone app to make new friends from all over the world. Swipe through new faces and check out each person’s profile. Chat with new friends on the app and even try video calls.
Target Users: Anyone looking for a new friend or partner.
Problem Overview: You can only meet a limited number of people everyday physically, but with a socializing app there’s no location or time constraints. When you bump into someone you’re interested in, you might want to find out whether you are a good fit before you reach out.
Strengths: Allows you to post pictures of yourself, and list your interests. Everyone sets up their profile according to the instructions of the app, and it’s guaranteed to cover many aspects including but not limited to hobbies, beliefs, social goals, personality, and even quirks! It’s an effective way of expressing yourself and exploring others without the burden or stress of starting a conversation with a stranger.
Weaknesses: People may behave differently online and in real life. Users need to have a good judgment to tell the true personality of their virtually met friend. Information privacy might be another concern.
Placement: We put it on the lower-left quadrant because it focuses on introducing new people to each other while having a profile to view and not asking the users to invest more into it.
HeyTell
By Ni
Description: This app is a cross-platform voice messenger and walkie-talkie that allows you to instantly talk with friends and family who use Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 devices with the press of a single button. Voice messages are quicker than SMS—and free!
Target Users: Anyone with a smartphone who wants to communicate with others more easily
Problem Overview: Texting is harder and slower than talking. You need to find the right app to reach someone, click into it and type up what you want to say. Recording a voice message is more intuitive and convenient.
Strengths: You can easily friend, unfriend or block your phone contacts. You can choose a privacy level that determines who can find your contact information in what way. There’s also an invitation process to let you choose whether to connect with a new person. Messages can be exported to other platforms. Overall speaking, it’s designed for not only maintaining existing relationships but also developing new ones.
Weaknesses: Voice messages are fast, but it also loses the benefit of text message, which is preserving the chat history in the most straightforward way. You can also search through chat history and skim through texts. Also, since there’s no heads up of what the other person is saying, you might need a private space to listen to the messages.
Placement: We put it in the right-lower quadrant because it provides a tool for existing friends to talk to each other more easily while also mostly relying on voice-messages to staying in touch so the commitment is low.
The Marriage Pact
By Millie
Description: For one week every year, students at a college take a questionnaire asking them about their values and goals in relationships. They then get matched to their scientifically most compatible partner on campus.
Target users: College students, often ones in college campuses with connected social circles
Problem overview: College can be the best time to find a compatible life partner. But students are so busy too (career, classes) that they don’t have time to find a partner, much less a compatible life partner.
Strengths:
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- People use the product – Almost all Stanford undergrads take the Marriage Pact at least once before they graduate. Colleges regularly see 30-60% of the campus take the Marriage Pact each time it launches
- The product delivers high quality matches (delivers results) – 30% of those matched do end up meeting their date. As shown on the Marriage Pact Instagram there is a constant stream of actual relationships that have come out.
- Bang for your buck – Free right now. 30 minutes of survey time might lead to the life partner (in contrast to Tinder/Hinge which just soak up ALL the time)
- Matches who were strangers or loose acquaintances don’t need to sink in a ton of time but have a real chance of meeting a high quality potential match
Weaknesses:
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- Once a year – Students only get the opportunity to find true love this way once a year
- One match – Students only get one match. So if this one doesn’t work out, or you want options, that doesn’t happen.
- Some matches are just low quality
- No filtering – If you get a sibling or an ex, that’s just too bad
- One match a year means scarce supply – high risk for things not working out
Placement: Placed on the lower-left quadrant because it matches new people together but also is a one-time 30minutes quastanire to match people and leaves it to the matches to further figure out how much commitment they want to have in meeting each other.
By Millie
Description: The world’s largest professional network with more than 900 million members in more than 200 countries. The mission is to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”
Target users: Anyone in the workforce
Problem overview (from the employee perspective): Those in the workforce want to find jobs that are good matches for them, find and maintain professional connections, and maybe also know what’s going on in their industry and circles
Strengths: A profile that helps others find you, a strong network to search through with profiles to help you get to know even strangers, popular and frequent usage from other users means you get up to date information and job postings
Weaknesses: The professional vibe makes it feel a bit filtered (look at the cheesy news feed lol) – the meaningful relationships start from maybe a point of self-interest and networking. Also job searching makes job seekers feel like a speck in the sea – impersonal. Cannot always differentiate between recruiter bots vs. genuine interest.
Placement: Lower-left quadrant because it’s like a social media with many people and users can engage in low effort activities such as liking or commenting on a post to interact with each other.
Lunchclub
By Erfan
Product Description: Lunchclub works by asking you questions about your background, professional goals, and interests, and then uses AI to match you with someone who may have overlapping goals or resources. You’ll receive an invitation to meet with this person for a one-on-one, 45-minute meeting. You can decide to go ahead with the meeting, which can take place in real life or over virtual video chat.
Target Users: The target audience of the app are people focused on their career who want to do networking such as entrepreneurs who are seeking out investors, startup founders who find cofounders, and growing companies who locate talent. It’s also about mentoring others and brainstorming with peers.
Problem Overview: Sometimes meeting new people can be a waste of time since it takes a lot of time to fill out the people who are relevant and necessary to your goal, especially in the field of career and professional settings. Lunchclub is a data-driven company for giving the best match to someone’s goal.
Strengths: The biggest differentiator of the app that gives it an edge compared to other apps like Linkedin and Bumble is the AI engine at the core of the app. It’s highly optimized for matching people with a lot of overlapping goals. It also doesn’t focus on the number of views and likes and tries to save time through matching than scrolling over many profiles.
Weaknesses: However the issues with regards to data privacy are a concern since the app uses a lot of your data and address book and goals to make the recommendation, and some people might not be comfortable with sharing so much data.
Placement: We put it on upper-right because it matches new people together but it asks them to do a video call with each other to meet. So it’s a slightly higher commitment.
DEX
By Erfan
Product Description: DEX is an app that connects to your Linkedin and Facebook to pull in your contacts and creates a profile for them based on your previous conversations. You can set reminders for how often you want to reach out to someone and take notes on your conversations. It sends reminders to your email about someone’s birthday and the due date for meeting them to encourage keeping a connection alive.
Target Users: Busy people with many friends who want a systematic way of reminding themselves to stay in touch with their network. Anyone can really use DEX but the majority are probably going to be of the age of a college student and above as these groups of people tend to have a wider network of friends.
Problem Overview: It’s easy to forget about your last conversations or forget to reach out to a friend. If you’re a person who constantly needs to be reminded and pushed to reach out to your friends or your contacts are all over the place in many apps. This is a great way to bring all of them to one place.
Strengths: The app is strong as it has a very simple UI and it has a powerful engine for automatically aggregating messages from many different platforms such as your email to automatically log the conversation and the last time you have reached out to the person.
Weaknesses: The problem with a personal CRM is that it needs a lot of dedication still to constantly check the app to stay on track with the reminders in the app. It needs diligence to keep the network active and usually, people fall off the social circle and the user has to go untrack a specific profile manually which adds a lot of friction.
Placement: Put it on lower-right because it’s a one-sided CRM for managing existing relationships but the user doesn’t have to initiate reaching out if they don’t want to so the commitment for using the app is low.
Garden
By Helen
Product Description: App sends reminders to stay in touch with friends, network, and family
Target Users: Adults
Problem Overview: Hard to manage network and friendships, keep in touch with people
Solution: Reminders to stay in touch
Strengths: For each person, tailor frequency, specific notes to remember about person, app tracks how long it’s been since last interaction
Weaknesses: Seems to be limited functioning, e.g. can’t add contact photos, can’t sync with most calendars, can’t sync with texts or emails
Placement: Similar to DEX, it’s a personal CRM so we put it on the lower-right.
Marco Polo
By Helen
Product Description: Texting, but with videos instead of text. In a recent study, 90% of participants felt closer after trading texts for Marco Polo
Target Users: Families, friends, everyone
Problem Overview: Want to find more meaningful way to stay in touch than just sending images and text
Solution: Sending videos
Strengths: “In a recent study, 90% of participants felt closer after trading texts for Marco Polo” “One video is worth a thousand texts”… Good privacy, 100% free
Weaknesses: Free version has limited capabilities
Placement: We put it on the upper-right quadrant because it asks users to engage in a high-commitment activity of reading Marco-Polo texts/videos together among existing friends.
Bumble BFF
By Safiyah
Product Description:Via Bumble website: “Bumble BFF is a simple, fun way to meet new friends and build a supportive community around you, no matter where or who you are”
Target Users: 23 to 29 is the most popular age group to use Bumble BFF and the app is also for men.
Problem Overview: It is hard to make friends and meet new people
Solution: An app where you can meet people in your area
Strengths: Large pool of people
Weakness: Kind of superficial, you’re just swiping on people and can lead to harassment
Placement: We put it in the lower-left quadrant because it’s similar to swiping apps and doesn’t ask much from the user to review to meet someone besides swiping on them and also only focuses on people who already don’t know each other.
Love Nudge
By Safiyah
Product Description: Suggests goals for improving your relationship with your partner based on your love languages. Gamifies the process of nudging your partner to meet your need. Allows you to track progress
Target Users: Couples interested in using love languages as a way to improve their relationship
Problem Overview: Everyone has a different love language, and your love language may be different from your partner.
Solution:
Love Nudge encourages couples to explore their partner’s love language and provides a structured way to do this. When you first download the app, you complete a 30 question quiz to determine your love language breakdown, between Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Physical Touch, and Acts of Service. It allows you to set goals, which are actionable items (ie saying I love you) to show your partner love. It also allows users to record and track how loved they feel.
Strengths:
- Novel attempt to strengthen behaviors using a systematic approach (love languages)
- Provides “anchors” to promote behavior change, like setting reminders for recurring activities (ie getting coffee together once a week).
Weaknesses:
- Barrier to entry – must complete 30 questions to access other parts of app
- Doesn’t seem like it would be used long term: once someone learns about their partner’s love language and how to “speak it” they may lose interest in the app and stop using it.
Placement: we placed it on the upper-right quadrant because it helps couples to learn about each other’s love language therefore these people have very deep friendships already and also gives you features for setting goals and surveys to learn more about each other therefore the users can put more time into the app if they want to.
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