Hello Product Hunt!
Status is a simple status app that delivers updates automatically from your phone. You choose who to share state with, and the app gives you an instant glance at who's free and busy. In our research, a very large proportion of messages sent are to do with co-ordination ("busy?", "coffee?", "how far are you?" etc). We figured this could become a lot more efficient if we leveraged the context our smartphones have about what we are currently doing. In theory, our phones could be answering those questions for us. Status is our version 1.0 attempt to make communication with our nearest and dearest more efficient, first simply by answering "who's free" automatically. I'm looking forward to engaging with the community, answering questions and getting feedback to make the app better!
For those interested, I wrote about it in more detail on Medium here: https://medium.com/@kul/introduc...
Nice work @kul.
I've been thinking about a concept similar to this for a while. Have you thought about integrating with existing data services to determine an individual's context? Rather than just location what they're doing, 'working on project x' (because they sent Github commits), etc.
Also have you thought about making a mac app to post the location? That way team members can just ping whether they are in the office, working from home only or their preferred coffee shop. I could see this quite useful for remote workers.
@kalv great points Kalvir! Yep - if we go the enterprise route we can integrate with all these services to make statuses a lot richer. For me, an "at desk" status itself will be really useful.
Yeah - we've thought about a web app too, we'll probably make it too. Thanks for the feedback!
@Kul I've been using this app in beta for a while now (disclosure: I'm an investor) but I'm curious to know: what's the most surprising user behavior you've seen?
@alexisohanian there's a few things!
- we have some users who open the app 30+ times a day with only a handful of friends on there!
- this new "make plans" feature we're experimenting with (swipe on someone's profile to suggest drinks) is being repurposed into a de facto form of messaging
- finally, that even though there's a hump to get over, folks don't mind sharing location generally, i think 48% of all friendships have it switched on right now
Used this for a few days now.
1. I find myself checking it every now and then just out of curiosity. Nothing too serious. Most people are at home or "out" all the time. Never see anyone in meetings. Sometimes @rrhoover is at Philz, natch.
2. When I was watching Newsroom I wanted to update it manually because that's one of those times where holy moly do not interrupt me.
3. I know not many people would probably do that ^^ too often but maybe that's OK—just manually update now and then. It'd give it a sense of fun and creativity that doesn't exist right now.
I like that it's automated but it feels too automated.
@rrhoover@thetylerhayes Great feedback, thanks! Yep - we're adding some manual statuses. Currently people want some version of "do not disturb", and "party mode!" to augment the current status. Also, it becomes more addictive the more friends that are on there. We are seeing some users open the app 30+ times a day! For me this weekend it was great, I have 70ish friends on there and wherever I am in SF I usually have some friends nearby.
Keep the feedback coming! You can always ping me directly too (kulveer@trystatus.com).
@PieterPaul Hi Pieter, I've been surprised at just how many people quickly add in a "gym" status. I guess there's some reward in telling people you've been working out :)
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I love the onboarding this app has. Extremely well done. I'd drop money on this if I can push my status to other channels. I'd IAP the options to push a status to other apps I'd used for the same context.
At work? Push to this status to foursquare and maybe Twitter.
At your favorite coffee shop? Push to foursquare, etc.
looks cool, downloading now.
A note in the iOS description. It says "Status doesn't affect your battery life, because that wouldn't be cool. We've done this by highly optimizing our algorithms, and lots of testing." Three sentences later though, the description says "Disclaimer: Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life."
By the way, how do you think this will work differently than life360? To a certain degree, the functionality is very similar but the positioning quite different
@preetnation Apple made us insert that! Yeah, we know about Life360, it may end up being that we compete with them but we're less interested in the "family safety" angle, and more on how you can spend more time with friends.
@kul Surprising that Apple, king of elegant product descriptions, would make you do that =/
I don't think you have anything to worry about with competition vs life360 in the near term
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