Alex Cornell

Cocoon - A private app for the most important people in your life

by•
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.

Add a comment

Replies

Best
AMY
This reminds me how much I miss Path and how it brought friends and family closer together 🄺 Excited to try it out!
Jason Kim
Congrats on the launch Sachin + Alex! Been testing Cocoon and so far it's great. šŸ‘: - As a permanent do-not-disturb iPhone user the notification design is thoughtful and encouraged me to enable notifications for this app - Threaded messages work well - UI is welcoming and onboarding was quick - "Now" feature is great, steps and battery percentage is a nice touch šŸ‘ŽšŸ¤”: - Awkward iOS interactions with video content (tapping into videos pauses everything once the video is playing) - Bug with camera image capture, once you take a photo and try to review it before uploading it reverts back to camera - Only "hearts" for quick msg responses and no other emojis šŸ’”: - Mixed media replies (reply with an image/video) within a thread - More varied quick response beyond heart (thumbs down, exclamation etc) - Quick poll as a message type? - IG Stories like feature for profile
Alex Cornell
@jasonkimbc Thank you Jason! This feedback is great and I love your format. Always feel free to send more! feedback@cocoon anytime. To your šŸ‘Ž notes: - Great point about video replies. We don't handle this well right now (it can be a bit weird for photos too, when conversations get really long). We have a good design for how to address this. - I *think* this camera bug you describe is by design, I'll describe the intent: in the Camera, when you take a picture, a little thumbnail will appear below the viewfinder. You can take as many photos as you wish before posting (we call this multi-capture, and it's pretty great once you get used to it). To make it very lightweight, there is no explicit 'review' step – the only way to review an image is to press and hold on it. This will display the image you took as long as you press down. There is no way to "do it over" besides leaving the composer. This part, isn't great, but it's gotten us 80% of the way there so far. (Let me know if that sounds like what you're experiencing). - Correct, only hearts right now. Thank you for you šŸ’”, much appreciated :)
Ashton Squires
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?
Alex Cornell
@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.
Ashton Squires
@alexcornell Sounds good! Looking forward to using it
Edison Espinosa
Another ex Facebook person launching a network shocker. Let's see how long you guys stick with this.
Alex Cornell
@edisonjoao6871 I suppose we will all see together! I will say - working on something designed to enhance my relationship my family is just about the most fulfilling possible job I could have :)
Edison Espinosa
@alexcornell finding fulfillment in your job is great and so glad you found it.
Alex Cornell
@edisonjoao6871 Thank you :)
Camille Ricketts
Gorgeous, thoughtful. It proves that tech is still capable of being remarkably human and emotionally connected.
Ben Lang
Congrats on the launch! Excited to give this a try with my family. šŸ™Œ
Callen Hedglen
Looks cool! However, I feel like I would have a hard time convincing my friends to use a different app instead of just a group chat. Convenience of using something they know outweighs being able to see steps, flights, etc. The one instance where I think they would consider it though is for when there's people in the group chat that don't have iPhones. Apple won't let you rename the chat in those instances, and whenever you like a message, it just says "[name] liked [message]", which annoyingly repeats a bunch of times for every like. That's a pain point I think you could target ^^ Best of luck!
Callen Hedglen
I'll add, I've had friends go out and switch to iPhone just because of this pain point!
Alex Cornell
@chedglen Hey Callen! Thanks for the message. You bring up a good point: it is HARD to get people to download new apps and adjust their habits. Especially for something as core as this. To your point, we are planning to support multi-platform asap, so <100% Apple chats will be much smoother. Cross-platform will be a great advantage. But we know we'll need to go well-beyond that to convince people to switch. I don't think there will ever be a single answer for this – it will differ for each person, in terms of what they care most about. For me, the threading model is enough to prefer Cocoon over a crazy group thread that sends me notifications every time someone reacts to my message (!?) ... but for others, it might just be the shared gallery. We think a lot about providing people with the tools to help convince other folks to try it. That's part of why we even launched yesterday - so there was a destination where invited users could go and learn about the app and our values etc. We'll have more to add here in time.
Andrew
Very well made! Since it seems like this question is becoming more and more important with new social networks, I have to ask, what's your planned revenue model if you're never planning to have ads or collect user data?
Alex Cornell
@andrew2 Hey Andrew, to quickly answer your question, the plan is paid subscriptions. Some more info scattered above on this – but the gist is, we want Cocoon to be valuable enough that you would pay for it. That will insure our (the company) incentives are aligned with you (customer).
Andrew
@alexcornell Fair enough, sounds good!
Marius Masalar
This seems very promising—eager to try it with family/friends!
Daniel B
Whats the business model? when companies aren't charging its usually because the users are the product...
Alex Cornell
@dnlbtlr Hey Daniel, some more answers above to this, but quick answer is: we'll monetize through paid subscriptions. Sachin wrote a relevant note on this above which I'll quote here just for ease: "From a business standpoint, we have no reason to share your data with 3rd parties or sell it for any reason. We don't even have a reason to build up any internal data profiles since we'll never be serving ads. In fact, we have every reason not to do these things since privacy/intimacy/trust is at the core of why people would want a space like Cocoon."
First
Previous
1234
•••
Next
Last