Role

Co-founder

Date

August 2023

Product

Application to discover what your friends are reading / watching / listening to

Design

After reading about the Theory of Maximum Taste I knew I needed to re-evaluate the content I was consuming but couldn't find a place to easily discover good long form content. I had a feeling others might be experiencing the same. To test the idea I created a newsletter with links of content my friends enjoyed.
Each week a group of friends would text me 3 of the favorite things they've consumed, I'd aggregate the links and send them out on Sunday using Mailchimp
Below is how the newsletter looked:

The second iteration involved creating the UX through SMS and a webpage. During the onboarding process users would get sent a contact card that they could send links to. Each week they'd receive a text message with a url to a weekly digest.

Final iteration, was implemented through integrations with Spotify, Apple Music, Goodreads and Letterboxd to pull data from those services. I still believe that SMS is the most low friction UX for a product like this. That's why the core of the product remained the same -- sharing links via text message. The result was a dynamic link-in-bio page users could use to display the content they're consuming as well as discover what people they follow are into.

Reflection

I believe there's an opportunity in building on top of messenger apps as the primary interface for social applications, as those are the applications people open everyday. During the duration of the project time we received over 26,000 submissions.

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