What up PH! I’m Danny, CEO and co-founder of Free with @kelvin.
We started working on Free over a year ago to solve a tricky problem: sharing when you’re available and making plans with your friends is damn tedious. It’s also pretty inefficient, intimidating to share with lots of people, and not that fun. If you’re like us: you text a bunch of people individually to hang, get a few responses, wrangle groups as people jump in/out, then finally meet up. We know software can make this way, way easier.
There are a lot of awesome folks who have taken a crack at this problem but none have quite hit the mark yet for us. We’re no strangers to how nuanced and difficult the problem is — this is one of many major iterations we’ve built and we’ve put out our fair share of lemons. We finally have a take that’s been testing well with our friends & family, so we wanted to open it up to more people and see if they agree.
This is where we’d be really grateful for your help. Give Free a try and let us know what you think. We’d love frank feedback (real talk) and ideas on how Free could be better with way, way more folks. We know it has many ways to be better and want your input. Personally, I’d love to jam on the problem with anyone in this community - add me as “danny” on Free and hit me up!
PS we're going out tonight in SF to celebrate - if you’re available, come out and don’t be a stranger! Join my Free and the first round(s) are on us.
@dtrinh nice! Glad to see this in the wild. Congrats on the release!
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@dtrinh Totally understand the pain that you are trying to solve. I will definitely give a try. My only concern on using Free is how can I make all my friends subscribe to Free seamlessly so I can make start push events to my entourage. Let's say if a create an event can I share it on my most used communications channels, such as Messenger, Twitter and Emails?
@dtrinh Awesome product! Wanted to have something like this for a long time (and actually thought of building this myself), but Free does everything I would want in such a product and is beautifully executed. Congratulations on the launch!
The Good: Congrats on the launch! The app is beautifully simple and you're coming out of the gate with a boatload of features but it doesn't feel weighed down. That chat experience is legit. The status posting is super lightweight. EMOJI LINKS?!
The Bad: The name "Free" makes App Store searching impossible. The verification code system timed out a couple times though suspect that's not your fault. If this hits a critical mass, there's going to be a lot of notifications flying around. Seeing statuses from 11 hours ago can make it feel stale.
The Ugly: I think there is a good reason why apps like Red/Green, Status and others have failed to make real headway in solving the problem of getting people together: broadcasting generally is too impersonal for people to feel included. It works for close friends that you know are always down to see you, but for acquaintances and people you're just getting to know it's pretty awkward to invite yourself along/join the chat. There's also an awkwardness about posting your plans publicly: either your signalling that you want to do something but don't have (enough) people already to make it fun; Or, on the flip side, your announcing to everyone that you have plans and aren't interested in hanging out with anyone else. At the end of the day I'd rather just text those people I want to hangout with directly than worry about a whole pack of new social norms.
That said, if anyone can make the status concept work, I'd put my money on you guys.
Good luck team Free!
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@savvy_suarez lots of great points for the good, the bad, and the ugly.
@savvy_suarez Very good points. Have to agree on most of the ugly points. I myself would feel awkward. Have had no problems with my Whatsapp groups for this type of stuff.
Congrats on the launch! Biggest concern is the name. Possibly the most difficult keyword to optimize w.r.t ASO. How are you going to get the app to the top of the App Store when users search for "Free"?
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@jhyu yea, I had to type out their full description to find it.
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Neat idea. Hope it works. twitter integration is too growth-hacky. Posts a tweet both (a) when the UI makes it look like you're "looking for friends", or adding contacts in-app and (b) without letting us see/edit the tweet.
Spamming people via the personal reputation of your users via twitter is not the best. Feels like "social" apps circa 2009, i.e. "spam the shit out of people" era.
@ben_mathes Agreed. Seriously, this Twitter auto-share stuff is annoying. Even in 2011 apps gave you the option to share on Twitter or not when you connected.
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@ben_mathes remember, he was the designer for Path when they spammed all contacts a few years ago ;)
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@ben_mathes Sorry about that. The intention wasn't to tweet automatically without you knowing: it says "via @…" with a checkmark next to it, but it's too easy to miss. Since the screen was unclear, we disabled Twitter posting this morning until we can fix that up in a future version.
I love this product idea. I think it fits a perfect hole: the "latent" status model. I don't want to "push" to my friends, but rather let them "pull" my availability. Most of the time I'm likely available, but not enough to reach out and attempt to organize anything.
I could see this extending beyond social, into pickup sports like tennis, basketball, cycling, etc.
Played around with it, invited my friend! However the delay in the text message confirmation (1-2min) hurts my soul during the onboarding process. Perhaps because of the PH traffic? Otherwise, love the FTUE, excited to explore the rest of the app!
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