I first discovered Rithm through @hnshah, an app to share "music postcards" with friends. Choose a song, add a photo, and hit send. Rithm 2.0 is much different, with an emphasis on chat.
@jbefored - what did you learn that lead you to build 2.0? TBH, there are so many different messaging services competing in this space that it seems risky to position oneself as "chat"? Thoughts?
@hnshah@rrhoover For us, chat is just the experience that best fit social music sharing and playing on mobile. What we learned with earlier versions of Rithm is that our most loyal users wanted something fast, fun and familiar. Their demand was for a simpler/more lightweight way to share lots of songs with friends, view the history of those conversations and listen to the tracks they like later on. So that pushed us to go deeper on the chat experience and supplement it with simple music features like the playlist.
On the one hand, there are lots of chat apps out there. On the other hand, it's the most amazing way to share content with friends and that's what we were trying to do really well.
At the same time, we ended up stripping away some of the more novel features and add-ons to focus on delivering a music experience that more people could quickly understand and enjoy.
Hope everyone is enjoying what we've created here but we know we've got a lot to learn...please hit me with feedback and questions.
Hey Jesse, congratulations the app is very well made. Can I ask you 2 questions: How do you make the deeplink to the review section in the App Store? I thought it is no longer possible. Also how do you make the direct share to Instagram?
Cool product Jesse, I really think you found a way to differentiate yourself from other chat apps, but how do you differentiate from PingTune? The video on the website is fun too.
I think you should incorporate a way to let users try to engage friends via text message from within Rithim so more people will use it.
@redpandacan thanks! And you're right on point - SMS has always been a solid driver of growth for us. You can send any song from within a chat via SMS by tapping on the share icon next to the song and selecting SMS from the share menu. Hope that helps...
In terms of differentiating from others taking a similar approach to social music, we've tried to push the fun/exciting parts of music sharing further through stuff like dancing emojis, notifications when a friend is playing your song, and curated songlists to make sharing more frictionless for everyone.
Outside of features, we had a lot of beta growth and got a really awesome community of music fans on Rithm + great partnerships with music labels and artists that will help us build some really unique and exciting stuff for our users in the near future.
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