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Cocoon — A private app for the most important people in your life
Cocoon is a dedicated space for the most important people in your life. You use it with a single group who you want to feel closer with — it's like your home, on your phone.
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Amazing product, love the thinking and research behind it! Any chance you could share with us how you guys managed to raise $3M seed while remaining under the radar?
Ok, looks interesting. My family is connected all through iMessage. What is the 10x value to switch?
@mrkampmann A good question – for 99% of the threads you have on iMessage, Cocoon probably won't get you to 10x value. It's designed for the 1% of people who you care about 100x more. For those people, Cocoon is easily 10x better, largely because it is designed for that specific use-case (supporting your closest relationships).
Sachin touches on this above – basically there is a whole category of features that wouldn't make *any* sense inside of a general purpose messaging app, but would provide incredible value inside Cocoon. Two I'm excited about here are: ambient sharing (lightweight automatic updates around location/weather/activity etc) and automatic flight tracking (which is coming soon).
Does anyone remember the Path app? Why did Path end up failing? It was beautifully designed and promoted the same value prop as Cocoon. Was Path to early to the space? Is second time the charm? Is there enough people who buy into this vision to turn it into a business? How much traction would it take to make sure Cocoon can stay operational?
@adamwebber I'll always welcome comparisons to Path, as I was a huge fan of the app and what they accomplished. Indeed, we share similar goals around supporting close relationships. While there is certainly narrative overlap, the construction of our solution differs in important ways.
Cocoon is not a social network. A network, even when capped in size, is still ultimately a broadcast medium between asymmetrically connected individuals. The dynamics around sharing, privacy, identity management etc still apply, just as they would in a large network.
Cocoon's model is more like a group thread. There is no network. The app is a private space for you and the few people who've decided to be in your Cocoon together. This creates an intimate/interconnected group dynamic that wouldn't be possible in a network of individuals.
Of course, who knows if that's ultimately any better of a model lol, but it is distinct.
I'm glad Cocoon reminds people of Path, because Path was awesome. We ultimately are trying to achieve very similar goals, just in a different way.
I really want to be excited for this, but in it's current state it's not really usable for me _yet_. I really hope that changes. I know I've seen @alexcornell touch on this on twitter (referring to it as the in-law problem) but lots of people will belong to different Cocoons. With a platform like Cocoon, I expect I'll want to share the same content with quite a few different groups. I'm hoping we'll see a way to do that easily that doesn't require going through the post flow over and over again or spam people who are in multiple cocoons with you with the same content.
I'd also like to see more post types and search features, I feel like those were both ways that Path really shined.
@_taurean Thanks Taurean, multi-Cocoon is top (almost, technically #2) of our list right now. It's very important. We had to prioritize the basics ahead of it, getting to launch, but we're working hard on it now.
Looking forward to hearing what you think once we have it ready :)
I'm more keen to know what's the likelihood you guys will end up selling your business to Facebook...
Congrats on the launch! Excited to try this with my family over the holiday.
Seems really promising. Would love to see multiple cocoons as well! Cheers and great work!
@alexcornell - just wanted to say I'm a fan of your work. Was not surprised at all by the production quality of this video and the visual/motion design of the app. Some really interesting ideas worth exploring here, excited to see the team iterate on this!
@bryantpeng Thank you! Any chance to break out the Origami prototyping machine, I will TAKE IT!
@jaggedlines @amrith thanks for finding! we're working on making our privacy policy more discoverable and making the language itself a lot stronger and more clear as we speak too.
Fantastic idea!! Do you have an API to access the information? I would love to use it for my home automation.
@monga - Could you speak of how encryption (resting, p2p.. if any) and - truthfully - who can or has access to the information the user adds in the app please?
@monga never mind, cheers. I’ve just ready your privacy policy and tos.
Great looking app. Personally, I reckon the words “private space” are misleading.
The contents added by the user are not private at all according to the Privacy Policy and there’s a whole discussion there in relation to what the campaign video portrays in itself.
I would not be able to trust the content/privacy of my family and close friends to such an operational model and, as it is, I don’t believe you guys can afford shifting it towards privacy (investment and business plan offered for it?)
That would be a pass for me.
I've been looking for an app like this! However, it's really important for it to have group polling to make on the fly decisions. Is this something you are planning to add?
I've been hoping a product like this would come out, very interested to see where it goes! Can I ask, do you plan to offer 'premium features' in the future? Whats the business model?
@ashton_squires Thanks Ashton! The business model will eventually be paid subscription. We will not run ads. Ultimately, Cocoon should be valuable enough that you would want to pay for it. That's the goal.
The subscription model itself, is something we're working on now.
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