Erik Torenberg

Palaround - Meet people you should be friends with.

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Joel Kliksberg
Hi Hunters! I'm Joel, founder of Palaround. After six months in beta, we're thrilled to publicly introduce the product today. Ordinarily, the people we meet in our lives are left completely up to chance. For example, a new best friend may live next door, but fate hasn’t brought you together yet. Our hope is that Palaround will. Every day at noon, Palaround asks you three Buzzfeed-style personality quiz questions and shows you nine people you should meet based on your answers, proximity and mutual friends. We hope you enjoy the product and can’t wait for your feedback!
Joel Kliksberg
And forgot to say thank you for hunting us @eriktorenberg!
Samir Doshi
@jkliks Think you guys nailed the aspect of making this fun and non threatening
Keegan Rooney
@kwdinc @yvanscher @divjpatel @fredrivett Palaround = Tinder for Friends. Would love to be considered for joining the ranks of your 'Tinder for X' collections!
Yvan Scher
@keegan @kwdinc @divjpatel @fredrivett I saw this earlier and checked it out. I did have a question actually: Can this help you make friends if you have an introverted or anti-social personality? It sounds strange but my thought was that there would be a self selection bias (the people choosing to download the app) towards sociable people. If an anti social person uses the app, what are there chances of actually meeting another friend on the platform who understands that personality type?
Keegan Rooney
@yvanscher @kwdinc @divjpatel @fredrivett Great question, Yvan, not a strange thought at all. Palaround is for introverts and extroverts alike. The answers you give to our daily quizzes help Palaround get a sense of what type of person you are so that it can find better matches for your personality type. Pretty much, the more questions you answer, the better your chances of meeting a friend with a similar personality type become!
Joel Kliksberg
@yvanscher @keegan @kwdinc @divjpatel @fredrivett @keegan @yvanscher @kwdinc @divjpatel @fredrivett - also - funny icebreakers like "Would you make love to your clone?" and "Say something nice about congress" make it much easier to get a conversation started
Yvan Scher
@keegan @kwdinc @divjpatel @fredrivett I did notice a small bug. When using fb signup the first time I press the fb login button it tells me 'ugh it seems you cancelled the login' I then have to try again. I kind of skipped through the intro steps ... maybe something to do with it.
Jesse Holmes
Any word on android release?
Joel Kliksberg
@jessetheranter - hoping to have it ready by this summer!
Daniel Ilkovich
Really cool concept Joel, looking forward to being a part of the community as it grows!
Keegan Rooney
@vhmth @alancassinelli Thought you might find this interesting. Works for all genders!
Keegan Rooney
@_bilaal @lucylzhao Palaround is a great new way to make new friends. Would love to be considered for your collections on making new friends! Let us know what you think.
Piyush Agarwal
How did you avoid falling in the trap of being treated as a Dating app?
Joel Kliksberg
That’s a great Q @inditravlr. The stated goal of the application is for friendship. Most of the features like the “friendability” score as well as the funny questions and icebreakers are built with this in mind. In addition, as @jonthanfielding points out below, to reduce confusion about intentions we’re currently testing a feature that only introduces you to people of the same gender.
Jonathan Fielding
I love the idea of this App but as a guy who finds it easier to have friends who are women, I find it annoying that it only matches you with people who have the same gender. Also the questions are very targeted towards women, first question I got was 'My girlfriends and I are most likely to spend Sunday'.
Joel Kliksberg
That’s a great point @jonthanfielding. Right now we are testing a gender wall so that women only match with women and men only match with men. Many female users requested this feature to reduce confusion about intentions. The response from users thus far has been fairly mixed and we’re giving this feature another few weeks before making a more permanent decision, so your feedback is super helpful. As for the questions, we have made about 95% of them unisex. Keep playing a little bit more and let me know what you think!
Jonathan Fielding
@jkliks maybe part of the reason why people might have mixed intentions is because all you get is a pic, the location, age and name when you first see the person. Perhaps a slightly bigger profile visible immediately would help simply because your taking an interest in the person and not necessarily what they look like. Things like, favourite music, favourite food and their job could be shown. Also another couple questions that were not unisex - "Your crush asks if you want to go for a ride on his motorcycle. Your response:", to make that unisex all you would need to do is change the pronoun to be unisex so "Your crush asks if you want to go for a ride on their motorcycle. Your response:". "Which disney princess do you most identify with" could be changed to "Which disney character do you most identify with?" and answers could include 2 male and 2 female, I am sure you would get both genders who identify with Aladdin after all :D
Joel Kliksberg
This is great @jonthanfielding ! And noted on the questions. We'll make the changes!
Fred Rivett
Having only recently started a job that means I'm up in London a lot, I'm acutely aware that there are a tonne of great people around who it would be great to connect with. Current solutions are going to meetups and meeting friends friends, which are great, but they still leave a big void of possible people I'll never meet. Tools like this, if executed well, could be hugely valuable in bringing people together who never would have met otherwise. I'm totally in as soon as this comes to Android. Signed up 👌
Jon Wood
Of course, the issue with apps like these, with me being from an area like South Carolina, is that it's hard to get good use out of it since there's really no one getting in to these things early on until it really, REALLY catches on. Love the idea, though! Maybe I should just move. :p
Joel Kliksberg
@jwood - hear you. Not surprisingly, most of our users right now are in LA, NY and SF.
Anton Sekatskii
@jwood Imagine someone from Eastern Europe :p
Rafi Zikavashvili
Awesome concept! Congrats Joel!
Joel Kliksberg
@rafizkv Thanks Rafi!
Erik Torenberg
I love the concept. Joel will it be segmented by interests so I can befriend fellow book-lovers?
Joel Kliksberg
Thanks @eriktorenberg ! Absolutely. We don't have a direct search feature for interests, but the app learns about your preferences over time through your answers to Qs, selection of personality types in your profile and your descriptions in the "looking for" section.
Inhan Do
What does the app's name mean? I just wonder haha
Joel Kliksberg
@status_200_ok :-D Palaround = pal around = http://idioms.thefreedictionary.... = the pals are literally around you because it's a location based app