Frisbee

@lavrusik I'm so impressed by the execution! Congrats guys!

@rrhoover nice, yeah big fan of Houseparty and what @benrubin is doing over there. Was just chatting with him about this iteration a few weeks back. You're right, Frisbee was an evolution of Alively. We saw an emerging behavior in Alively of people using it to communicate with one another, sending each other video messages, rather than as a tool for sharing and streaming live video. Communication requires all parties involved to engage, otherwise it's not a conversation. Whereas sharing can be a bit passive or one-way. With the emerging use case, we saw that people would start sending each other video messages back and forth, engaging in conversation (whereas sharing was much more passive). The other key thing that we learned from Alively users was that they loved the Groups feature, particularly college students, even though the feature was pretty buried in the Alively product. As we started to dig into video for communication, there a couple of key insights. One is that video more accurately represents how we communicate in real life, which is face-to-face. This is why video chat feels so good to use because it's how we as humans are wired to communicate. So much of the data that our brains process is other people's faces. The internet has hacked this by making it primarily text-based, which is more impersonal and less authentic. Video enables us to express our emotions and true feelings in ways that text cannot. The second is that the messaging platforms people typically use for chatting and sharing with small groups aren’t designed for video communication, and are pretty bad at it. Unlike social sharing platforms that have quickly evolved to meet people’s video-first demand, incumbent messaging platforms (e.g., WhatsApp, iMessage, Messenger) are still dominated by antiquated text-based communication and utility use cases. We started asking ourselves, what would WhatsApp have looked like if it was built in a video first world? That's where a lot of our core product principles came out of. With Frisbee, we are providing intimacy not utility. Frisbee enables people to intimately communicate with one another through instant video messages in a shared space where they can feel safe to communicate authentically and share unfiltered moments with their close friends.

@bjlib70 i agree that it would be great to have, but many folks are working with constraints of capital, developers, time etc. I’m sure an Android version is on the way!

@bjlib70 it would be nice, but it makes sense for companies to focus on getting to product market fit ASAP. It's faster to iterate by developing on one platform only, and then port to Android when you have a product people love.

@bjlib70 To echo @daniellevine's point. It would be great to do both, but with a small team it slows you down especially when you're iterating fast and still figuring out the product market fit (as @sebfeed mentioned). Also, the demo that we were targeting in the US is primarily on iOS so it made more sense to start there.