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I feel like there is a good idea in this space. Sup and Drop Messages are doing something vaguely similar too.
I just wonder why Zenly felt the need to add emojis and battery life as part of its core offering. I think focusing effort on something more substantial to make the app stand out would be better. (just my opinion)
As Ive said previously, I feel like this would work well as an invisible app/chatbot
Hey @bentossell you are on the spot for the invisible app! We are working on integration to Alexa, and have an internal slack bot that responds to questions like âwhere is Ben?â or âwhen will ben come back from lunch?â. Weâll be opening up a few APIs in the coming weeks and look forward to what will be built on top.
Battery life - We used it during the development process as a way to get quick feedback on our latest battery optimizations when out of the office. Beta users loved it so much that we couldnât take it outâŠ
Emojis - 1 in 4 sessions is followed by a communication. People have been bullying us so that weâd allow them to communicate in-app. You have so much context in Zenly (close friends, location on the map) that often you donât need a complete text message & a real keyboard to share an intention. The feature is a month old, and we discovered that users make riddles to make plans :
âYo + Pizza + ?â
and the following response:
âThumb down + Sushi + ?â.
We rolled out a custom one for PH btw :)
Battery life - We used it during the development process as a way to get quick feedback on our latest battery optimizations when out of the office. Beta users loved it so much that we couldnât take it outâŠ
Emojis - 1 in 4 sessions is followed by a communication. People have been bullying us so that weâd allow them to communicate in-app. You have so much context in Zenly (close friends, location on the map) that often you donât need a complete text message & a real keyboard to share an intention. The feature is a month old, and we discovered that users make riddles to make plans :
âYo + Pizza + ?â
and the following response:
âThumb down + Sushi + ?â.
We rolled out a custom one for PH btw :)
Thanks @gabriel__lewis for hunting us! We are super happy to be on PH today!
Hi guys!
Co-founders of Zenly here, hoping to catch some quality feedback on what we are doing. Weâve been on a mission to popularize constant location sharing for the past 5 years.
Zenly is now the closest thing to a social network built on a map, with your friends and family.
We were hardcore users of Foursquare and Gowalla but felt there was too much friction in the asynchronous check-in. We launched our first app 3 years ago that was focused on families & teen security. It did well in terms of downloads, and very bad in terms of retention. People were deleting the app because it was killing their batteriesâŠ
So we spent more than 2 years cracking low-power, realtime anytime, and precise location sharing. We released in stealth what was our internal prototype a year ago only hoping to catch 200-300 users who would validate our algorithms IRL. Weâve been growing by 8% per week organically since and are launching officially today.
On average people receive 6-8 phone calls & texts about their location per day:
âIâm leavingâ âIâll be here in 10 minsâ âWhere are you?â âOn my wayâ.
Zenly is the best way to get an answer immediately, sharing your location continuously or temporarily, in the app, or through a URL.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the globe are using Zenly every week.
Teens use it with large groups of friends to stay connected, never miss out, meet-up, find each other outdoors (festivals, beaches, etc).
Families, roommates and couples use it to coordinate, and for safety reasons.
NGOs use it to keep track of their dispatched team members, often in remote areas around the world.
There is even a bus system in Chile using it to communicate bus positions to their customers.
We discover new use cases every day⊠you can even share your location with a link temporarily anywhere on the web...
Our users engage in conversations based on what they see in Zenly, and the next step is allowing them to happen in-app. The very first proof of concept is our emojis which one could see as Yo with context. 2 taps and 1 emoji to share a message thatâs often more explicit that 200 characters.
Looking forward hearing from you all!
Ask us anything!
EDIT: @romaindillet was nice enough to share some thoughts about his experience with Zenly on @techcrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/19...
@an21m
"On average people receive 6-8 phone calls & texts about their location per day"
Source?
I like the sound of how you grew until launch. It feels you were able to slowly capture value through UX iteration rather than feature-wise since it seems there aren't many features.
Was this a pivot? are you bootstrapped? any investments?
Now for the obvious question: How do you plan to monetize? since this is peer to peer, unlike 4sq, I tend to believe it has less monetary value. IAP for vanity stuff? Ads? Premium features?
Edit: OK, read the TC article, 10m euros is quite a lot, and very impressive investors. I guess your metrics speak for themselves. I'm interested to know how did you fund building the product before the investment? Seed? Bootstrapped? It's rather rare to see startups waiting to nail the product before getting a substantial funding round. Kudos.
@an21m @gabriel__lewis @romaindillet @techcrunch Quite impressed by the playful UX and the low battery consumption, it's rock solid!
Q: How do you guys see competition with Facebook Messenger? Their strength: they own the network (all my friends are using it, it's easy to share my location with them).
I guess it's the end of "I'll be there in 5 minutes!" and "I'm already on my way" when I'm still stuck in the couch..
Btw, French power! đ«đ·đ·
Thanks @danr_4 !
Bootstrapped, Launch, Seed, Pivot. Bootstrap again. We ate pasta for years :)
All our cash was going into engineering, buying test devices, and design.
We have a few plans to monetize but it's too early to focus on them yet.
All our efforts go into growth & product, shooting for 1M DAUs as fast as we can.
Great question @hfauq !
A few years ago Google couldn't push the privacy questions around your online identity & photo sharing because they had a brand asset to protect.
Facebook took the social space.
We think it will be a pure player, cross-os, and entirely focused on the subject that will take the location sharing vertical.
Just like Instagram & Snapchat took photo sharing on mobile, or WeChat & Whatsapp were winning chat before Messenger.
@an21m Focus always wins! I'm confident you'll nail this. People look really engaged with the app! Cheers!
Super cool! My company had a similar situation where we wanted to build a social app with a background location focus but ran into the same battery drain issue. We solved it and ended up pivoting to focus on free efficient location tracking and analysis tools (Cintric.com if you're curious).
Location is a really interesting space at the moment. Marketing and ad-tech use cases for location data have been advancing steadily, using location data to build rich profiles on consumers for better targeting. Many companies even measure the effectiveness of marketing on driving in-store visits and can optimize the timing of campaigns based on when they think you're going to go grocery shopping, etc. In the next year, we're even going to see the ability to use IDFA tied location data to bridge addresses & dollar amounts of anonymous credit card swipes to mobile-ad views tied to IDFAs. Which has very significant implications for measuring the effectiveness of campaigns.
On the consumer side, I've been surprised that use cases for location data are lagging a bit, and are overwhelmingly about a user's current location instead of going a step further into understanding that user or their context. Acceptance of background location tracking is certainly the first step though, any plans to dive further into context with Zenly? The new Android Awareness API and Sense 360 are pretty neat tools for this.
Hi @connorbowlan, we share the exact same vision around data & context.
We had to crack precise, low-power, and realtime location first in order to work on context next.
It's the path we chose to ensure enough user value to justify continuous location.
Now that our users generate a hundred million location points a day, we are able to start learning from them.
In the next few weeks we'll be pushing frictionless content around things like togetherness, predictions and places.
Our data team has been hard at work on the subject for over a year now!
Android Awareness is going to be awesome for that, and we also expect / hope for announcements @ WWDC.
@connorbowlan just discovered cintric. looks awesome what you can do with location analytics. is there a server side API as well? what would IDFA be?
Congrats! I looove this app. The UX is great. Also, the experiment you are running with the « Zenly Gift » ban seems very interesting to me. I would love to see the impact it is going to have in your community. :)
Thanks for the kind words @lecoupa !
We'll share some metrics on how many gifts we send out, to date we've received as many emails as upvotes :)
On top of having cracked the code of seamless location sharing technology, you guys are bringing new UX patterns on the table. You did better what A LOT of teams already tried to achieve. The best is ahead of you guys! Congrats đ
I've been using Zenly since the early days.
Impressed by the execution of the team who achieve to built this awesome tech behind the front.
Well done @an21m, @alexisbonillo and all the team!
Thanks @cyrilpaglino !
You know that it means a lot considering how in love with @heytribe we are ourselves :) @alexisbonillo
hey @an21m, I REALLY liked the user experience of the app and I think it's fun and intuitive. What power do you have more than Nearby friends feature of Facebook for example?
Great question @ofirchakon !
Nearby Friends is an awesome product, and the team that built it (originally from Glancee) also had a great product before that.
It's helping us out, evangelising location sharing.
Maps with people in general - even within Uber - are helping mentalities on the subject.
Now the usecase is very different.
It's great to know when one of your friends living abroad is in your hometown, or to get a general idea of who's in the same city as you are.
It is still poor and consumes too much battery when trying to pinpoint a realtime position on a map (think meeting-up).
It's a feature within a great product like photo sharing is only a feature within Facebook.
Snapchat or Instagram have made it their core functionality and have created awesome experiences on top.
Our average DAU opens the app 7 to 8 times a day, and the 20% most active open it 22 times on average :
Zenly responds to a primary and universal need, knowing what your friends are doing.
In the same way that you feel an addiction to knowing what's next in your Facebook feed, our users find surprises in Zenly everyday.
I spotted my dad sailing South of Corsica this morning:
and a long time friend in Palma de Mallorca while taking these screenshots !
The infinite variability right there (see @nireyal's awesome Hooked) will make me reopen the app later today.
We also think it will drive conversations (I just texted both), and that's our next step.
Zenly responds to a primary and universal need, knowing what your friends are doing.
In the same way that you feel an addiction to knowing what's next in your Facebook feed, our users find surprises in Zenly everyday.
I spotted my dad sailing South of Corsica this morning:
and a long time friend in Palma de Mallorca while taking these screenshots !
The infinite variability right there (see @nireyal's awesome Hooked) will make me reopen the app later today.
We also think it will drive conversations (I just texted both), and that's our next step.
Realtime location share feature makes me remember Glympse (http://glympse.com/) but your UX rocks man, it's pretty easy to use and I really like the interactions.
Great app.
I've been using Zenly for a while, and love it. It's been trending among the "New Apps We Love" in the AppStore for the last couple of days in the UK btw.
Thanks @tomasruta ! So awesome to hear that you love it. Any thing in mind that we should add / improve?
Apple has been very nice with us over the last few days, we are featured in 110 countries!
OK first of all the heart on your website for PH users, is not clicking :P ...... and secondly, what are you doin about chicken-egg?.....none of my friends are there on it and I am not willing to send them messages about it as they are tired of my messages....... how old is this app btw?
@iamnineblack Thanks for the report, @EtaixJ is on it, will be fixed in a second.
The beauty of Zenly, which explains our growth, is that you only need 1 active friend to find value. In certain territories, South Korea notably, Zenly is mostly used by couples with very limited networks in the app.
If you are able to get to 3 friends there is 86% chance that you'll still be with us after 12 weeks...
Now any help in bringing new users in will be appreciated, feel free to share it with your friends!
What you can download from the AppStore or Google Play is brand new, we were in stealth testing out different UIs and feature sets over the last year.
@an21m This is so awesome! I'm in Paris til Monday would love to come visit you guys. Bien joue les mecs đ
Let's make it happen!
PM me on Twitter and we'll find time for a coffee @bouazizalex ;)
zenly is my favourite ice-cream flavor, love the new logo, emojis and the go feature are the best. looking forward to send quick picture to alert friends when we are close to them, love the team â€ïžâĄïžđŠ
Hey @louis_malfoy care to pass by our office & design an emoji like you did for custom filters in @snapchat?
I've been following the team since january 2013 out of a random connection after having noticed the release of their first product on twitter. The release of Zenly last year came to me as a revelation of how powerful it could become. I have about 110 friends in my network and can't wait to see more social features to come out, the interactions from knowing where you are in real time are endless and so powerful ! :) Keep pushing guys, it's an honor to be part of your journey !
It's an even bigger honor to have you as such a strong believer & backer @2lr !
Our next step is to get you to 20+ openings a day:
Very nice App! I've been using it on daily basis for a while now. Efficient and very useful. The UX is also very impressive! Congrats guys!
I love the product, I've been using it for a while and am impressed by the evolution of it.
Indeed, the UX is very very well done and you can tell the product team is gearing up on the "fun" part of the experience, making it very accessible and cool to use.
High-five to the FRENCHIES :D
Hey @pallav_agarwal
Life360 was a pioneer in this space and did a lot to evangelize location sharing.
When they launched, the privacy questions were too strong to think about anything else than safety & families.
5 years later things have changed, and our signups are mostly teens and people sharing locations with their friends.
From what I remember the average user has 1,2 friends in Life360.
In Zenly itâs 4,5 and growing as our users go further in their lifecycle.
So we are building the feature scope that goes with that⊠Interested by any cool recommandation you could have !
So we are building the feature scope that goes with that⊠Interested by any cool recommandation you could have !
@platonenkonik
I would tend to think that @familyinsafe is closer to @life360 than we are :)
Thanks for the upvote!
I got introduced to this product a few months ago; it's incredibly helpful to see in a glance where friends are (and love that it displays percentage battery life left) in real-time. I use it daily + eliminates the need to text "Where are you?" Thanks for building a beautiful product.
Thanks for the kind words @warobins! Would love to know who introduced you to the app?
You are right @soniallatas.
It's not for everyone just yet, and we are fine with that.
Just like every benefit that comes with a little less privacy it will take time.
5-7 years ago most people didn't have a Linkedin profile picture because they didn't want their name & picture associated publicly online.
Our users tend to become confortable with the act of sharing their location after a few weeks, sometimes months.
They grow their networks over time, and vacations are generally a great stimulator.
They generally start out with people they live with + 1 bf, and only bring in their second circle later on.
Try it out, I'd love to hear what you think after a few weeks :)
Imgur Melee