Hi Product Hunters!
I am the co-founder of Topick with @cfaydi. After six months in private beta, we are publicly launching Topick: a modern way for communities to gather around the topics they love. We have learned a lot watching passionate people share and discuss thousands of stories on our platform these past months. We have used what we have learned to offer a new and simpler interface for these communities to have collective conversations in an environment that is both engaging and welcoming. So, we’re super happy to share Topick with you on Product Hunt today :)
Our goal is to build a simple and welcoming experience for everyone:
• Discover and join communities on your favorite topics
• Discuss the best posts shared by members and share yours
• Get the newest posts from the communities you’re part of in your feed
We hope you will like it and we will be really happy to get your feedback and answer all your questions!
We are sharing our vision and what we learned during our private beta in this post on Medium as well: https://medium.com/@macsym/intro...
@macsym To me, your main competition is Facebook Groups. What's different between Topick and Facebook Groups?
PS: the logo looks a lot like Discourse logo.
@benjaminnetter@macsym Hi Benjamin thanks a lot for your comment :) The way we see it Facebook Groups are one feature of a massive service. Which makes it hard for users to navigate the updates from their Groups, as they are mixed with all you friends status, pictures, etc in your timeline. A lot of people are also not comfortable (especially on more professional topics) to have their Facebook profile one click away from any members of a group on Facebook. So I'd say there is a difference of focus and philosophy.
@macsym Being part of fb is a blessing and a curse for fb groups. Curse because of the reasons you mention. Blessing because a billion+ people are always a click away. I've seen countless attempts to migrate FB groups to other platforms...haven't seen a successful migration yet (though I'm sure there are some examples out there). Engagement takes a massive dive, almost instantly when you move away from FB.
Congrats on the launch guys! I've seen the product evolved in a great direction lately, iteration after iteration, and quite a lot of engagement for a private beta. Now to the rest of the world :)
Hey guys, very cool website!
It appears that your product is very similar to Facebook Rooms that recently closed its doors after a year(https://www.facebook.com/help/ro...).
What's your plan to succeed - knowing that community is the main factor here - knowing that even Facebook didn't?
Cheers!
@widawskij Hi Jonathan, thanks a lot for your comment. Did you read this? https://medium.com/swlh/mobile-a... - It's one of the best article I've found about the saturation of the app market. Which I think played a lot in our decision to iterate on the web first. As you perfectly said it, even for giants like Facebook, pushing a new social app is difficult.
At Topick we decided to build a community first, with a few hundreds very engaged early users. So we have had the site in private beta for about 6 months. We believe this is our plan to succeed :) To make sure our communities are already regularly updated and with great conversations, before opening the site to a larger audience.
Topick
Riot
Topick
Horizon
Async
Topick
Fixtured | Your Sports Schedule
Maze
Topick