The strongest connections always come from telling your stories. miniDot brings a brand new experience to friend-making apps: no more large selfies, boring profiles and endless swiping games for random hookups, your stories will help you make real connections with people.
@chikuwa Thank you for the detailed response. I have a pretty good grasp about what you guys are building -- and it sounds interesting!
I asked the question because your website says Mini-Dot is a "game-changer for friend-making apps". That line suggests there are other friend-making apps.
Your approach, as described above, reminds me of a dating app that recently shuttered called Siren. They tried to spark conversation by sharing a daily question. I'm friends with one of its early employees and she told me years ago Siren was perfect for meeting people and making friends, even though they were branding it as a dating app. If you're interested in learning more about Siren's journey to inform your own, here's a good place to start (their end): https://www.geekwire.com/2017/da...
I love your approach of facilitating new friendships rather than trying to focus only on dating. That opens things up for you and addresses a real need (there are already plenty of dating apps). I'll be interested to see where your team takes it from here!
@jeff_osborn Thanks for your feedback again.
According to our observations, it seems that most social network services nowadays can only connect people they already know, for those who have graduated from schools or over 30 years old, it's harder and harder for them to meet new people, and the best way to meet new people might be via dating apps. However, different purposes lead to different results and complains about scams, bots, harassment and ineffective matches are everywhere.
We’ve checked out Siren and felt sorry that they’ve closed their doors in April 2017. I think we all start with good intentions to help people make new connections in a more meaningful and insightful way, maybe things won’t always work as we expect, all we can do is try our best to leave no regrets behind.
Thanks for your encouragement, we will keep moving on. Hopefully we can prove that this kind of approach still work and people can really connect by sharing personal stories rather than selfies very soon. :-)
@chikuwa Makes sense!
I mentioned Siren because the idea has promise and there's a lot to learn from those who tried and failed.
You didn't ask for my advice, but here it is anyway: If I were you I'd reach out to Siren's founders and talk to them as much as possible. I might even try to get them on board as advisors. No one is going to give you better advice.
Best of luck and I'll keep tabs to see where everything goes!
@jeff_osborn
In fact, I’m trying to learn more about Siren app to know the whole story. Honestly speaking, it never occurred to us that we could ask for advices from the founders, this is really a fantastic idea and we will try to reach out to them.
Thanks for your great tips again! :-)
downloaded the app and tried it, here is what I thought:
- personally I the idea and the UI is clean!
- so why is 'miniDot' the name , and the logo?
- not very friendly to a new user though. e.g: I couldn't see any contents from others, later I found it is maybe because of time just passed midnight and no articles counted as 'today'?
- I felt the paradox between 'friends' and 'story', only a few can write good stories, but most people can be a good reader, it is not symmetric in that 'you can chat if you two like each other's stories'.
- so I think maybe 'writing stories' is the more import part, but I don't see the effort of making writing stories a fun experience, now just plain text.
- no limitation of the story input, I viewed some users' stories, just as short as a tweet
@sunderls
Really glad to know that you’ve tried miniDot and would love to spend some time sharing your valuable comments with us. Below are some feedback from us:
1. About the logo design: in fact, it should look like a M for Minidot. And yes we have to admit that the relationship between the logo and the name seems not strong enough, we will try to make it better.
2. For new users: thanks for your suggestions, in fact, currently we are working on Trending page which will allow people to read/write more stories. But it would take a few time to deliver this feature; so a workaround would be provided for the next release: you can write more stories while browsing prompts you've never written before.
3. For the limitation of the length of stories, of course we are always looking forward to read so-called GOOD STORIES, but all stories are written equal to us. We don't want users to make up things to please others, instead we want them to capture their life moments. As long as people would love to write and share, even one sentence could mean the world to the writers themselves. All we can do is provide as many inspiring and interesting prompts as we can to nudge people into writing their personal stories. miniDot isn’t a story competition platform and it's our deep belief that every story will eventually find the one who can relate.
Thanks for your comments, they are really helpful and we are looking forward to hearing more! :-)
@meineleserei
As a tiny team of one engineer and one designer, currently we can only focus on iOS version first.
Sorry for any inconvenience, dear Android users. If miniDot gets popular, we might get more resources to work on Android and even Web versions, please don't hesitate to share miniDot with your iPhone friends.
Thank you so much. :-)
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