Cocoon

Maker

Hi, I'm one of the Co-Founders of Cocoon. If you followed our 1.0 launch in November, I thought it might be interesting to share some of the lessons that led us to 2.0 now. Cocoon started as a "companion app" for families, that we assumed would be used for mostly for lightweight sharing. But the world changed since our launch, and we learned that Cocoon is being used by all sorts of tight-knit groups as a primary vessel share and converse. If Cocoon were to be used as an explicit upgrade to an important group chat, we knew it had to become a lot more conversational. So we set out to re-think what a messaging app 100% optimized for an ongoing connection with a lifelong group would look like. Probably more of a "post" and "reply" model than a single infinite thread. And most conversations don't even start with text, so a richer composer makes sense. Then we spent months talking to people about what they hated about their most important/active group chats. The #1 answer was more a feeling of sadness than anything. Especially these days, think about all the meaningful content that just gets lost into an infinite abyss. This is because messaging apps were designed to make it as easy as possible to send a single disposable message. But for some groups, ephemerality (whether or not your message literally disappears) is a bug and not a feature. That's where the new Archive comes in, turning Cocoon's feed into a 3D space that you can zoom out of and navigate around. Nothing you share is ever lost. Most of our features wouldn't make sense for 99% of the threads you've ever been a part of but should act as a major upgrade to the threads that house your most treasured people and content. If you need more help convincing your group, you can check out https://cocoon.com/why.html and https://cocoon.com/privacy.html might help too. If you do get a group up and running, I'd love to hear how it goes! Please DM me any time on Twitter. Talking to users is the #1 way we decide how to evolve the space, and the Product Hunt community has been so helpful already. Thank you!

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5yr ago