Ben Rubin

Houseparty - Bringing empathy to online communication

Houseparty is a face-to-face social network.

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Hicham Amine
Great product Ben. What's your strategy to create the social networks effect on this app ? Because your KPI shouldn't be N° of downloads but instead making sure people will have their friends on-board soon enough when they sign-up. Word of mouth is the game changer! How are you planning to play around that? Do you have any target for early evangelists?
Ben Rubin
@hicham_amine hey Hicham! Beautiful question. Yes getting you to X friends in the first 24 hours is our #1 KPI -- you can see how the invite flow wrk and how the activity list work, that these are tool to onboard and match user's constantly.
Hicham Amine
@benrbn Yes, checked it out, worked pretty well ! We actually started testing it in the office. Pretty funny ! Good product !
Bruno Nascimento
@benrbn @hicham_amine Why not allowing to invite Facebook friends then? For example, plenty of my friends are not in the same country as me, so sending them a text is a no-go.
Khalif
Wouldnt it make more business sense to focus more on discovery and meeting new/random/nearby people as opposed to relying on my friends to download the app to chat with them?
Ben Rubin
@khaliphj hey Khalif! I don't believe random people would be a sustainable usage..... remember chat roulette?
Khalif
@benrbn Agree. I just thought a little bit of people discovery factor would make it more attractive... Right now it just feels like another IMO, FaceTime, Snapchat etc that I have to force my frienda to download. Awesome product btw! Love the product. Not bashing it .. Just giving constructive feedback.
Edwin Reynoso
@benrbn @khaliphj I've got a lot of friends on this so far, some were thinking that this was the point of the app. It might make sense to talk to strangers when its a group of you, when its one on one then yes it can be weird. It'd be something to experiment with. However I do like the friends of friends way of meeting people.
Greg Isenberg
The product is dope. Great stuff Ben + team!
Liat Mordechay
good luck @benrbn and the team!
Jack Dweck
Congrats on the launch, @benrbn and team! 🏠🎉 Been using Houseparty for the last few weeks and it's a lot of fun. Love the simplicity of opening the app and instantly being thrown into a group video chat with friends.
Ben Parr
I've been a user of House Party for a few months now, and the thing that has struck me about it is how serendipitous it is. I've had catchup conversations with my friends randomly because of a push notification, and I've made a few new friends. That's powerful.
Erik Torenberg
Congrats Ben, Jeff and team!! :)
Ben Dolman
Congrats on the public launch! The app is really well done. What tech are you using for the video chat portion? WebRTC? Are individuals connecting directly to each other via peer-to-peer or are you brokering all the video through servers? I can imagine there are significant technical challenges when showing that many live streams on a mobile device. Would love to hear how you accomplished that.
Steven Hambleton
@bdolman My guess is using something like Kurento or Jitsi or even a PaaS like Nubomedia. They'll all allow you to handle multi party as a single stream. My money is on Kurento although they've just been acquihired/acquired by Twilio.
Ben Dolman
@stinhambo Very cool. I hadn't heard of a couple of those -- glad to know they exist!
Mike Mignano
Flawless execution by @benrbn and the entire team. Congrats on an amazing launch - such a fun product!
Tomaž Štolfa
Congrats Ben! Played with this while in beta and always had a great fun experience. Looking forward to seeing this in the wild!
Ben Rubin
@tomazstolfa thank you Tomaž!!