Thanks @lylemckeany for hunting this! Let me share the story of the development of Nine.
I was in San Francisco in 2014 for three months to attend Tradecraft (I met Lyle there!). During my stay, I was surprised to see that many people were “SWIPING FACES” on apps. At the time, this was somewhat of a rare thing to see in Japan. I quickly downloaded as many apps as I could and started swiping. At first, matching with someone was an exciting experience, but I soon learned that the thrill died when nobody actually started talking. Because really, what do we know about those people? Nothing. After graduating from Tradecraft I went back to Japan and continued researching with my co-founder Mai(@mai_d_mai), passionately driven to creating an app focused on one’s INNER SELF and PERSONALITY.
We tried many approaches; symbols, using video, and using different profile formats… but they did not make us confident. One day while scrolling through Instagram, I noticed how easy it was to get a glimpse of someone’s personal world. Instagram photos are beautiful, and radiate originality. We soon figured out that by making photo collages using 9 photos from Instagram, it would be possible to create the dating app which focused on one’s inner self and personality that we’d always envisioned. We began working on the prototype right away, and were soon reassured of its merit. The problem was, how do we get this app to the people of the world? - 2015bestnine.com helped us. A lot.
It has been a month since then, and after much coding and product testing we are happy to finally be releasing “nine”. We would like to thank all those who took part in making a 2015bestnine photo collage, and we hope that nine can help bring people together!
@spyuchan@lylemckeany@mai_d_mai This looks like it *could* be a fun way for 'grammers that like each other's work in order to automatically follow each other's accounts, but the dating angle means I won't be downloading it. Shame really. Could have been a cool "discovery" app with a nice auto-follow feature when a match is found, but the fact that you push the dating angle so hard has put me off.
@bentossell@mai_d_mai Thanks!! Why? Because I am dedicating my life to dating app :) You are right. There is already tons of it. But there is nothing satisfies us. This 3x3 picture format helps us get a glimpse of people's personalities. I think this gives us a different UX :)
@therealsjr Thanks for the insights! We considered that way - auto-follow. But you know the follow-followed relationship on Instagram is a weak-tie, not suitable to communicate with new people. If we say "this is dating", people are comfortable starting chatting with new people. This is our aspect :)
@spyuchan had 130,000 people signup for this app after the #2015bestnine app went viral and made the 1,000 update club late last year. Excited to see if this takes off in a similar way. Congrats on the launch, Yusuke!
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Cool idea and UX! In your onboarding it says "I am a men" it should be "man"
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