Hi Product Hunters!
I am the co-founder of Topick with @cfaydi. After six months in private beta, we are publicly launching Topick: a modern way for communities to gather around the topics they love. We have learned a lot watching passionate people share and discuss thousands of stories on our platform these past months. We have used what we have learned to offer a new and simpler interface for these communities to have collective conversations in an environment that is both engaging and welcoming. So, we’re super happy to share Topick with you on Product Hunt today :)
Our goal is to build a simple and welcoming experience for everyone:
• Discover and join communities on your favorite topics
• Discuss the best posts shared by members and share yours
• Get the newest posts from the communities you’re part of in your feed
We hope you will like it and we will be really happy to get your feedback and answer all your questions!
We are sharing our vision and what we learned during our private beta in this post on Medium as well: https://medium.com/@macsym/intro...
@macsym To me, your main competition is Facebook Groups. What's different between Topick and Facebook Groups?
PS: the logo looks a lot like Discourse logo.
@benjaminnetter@macsym Hi Benjamin thanks a lot for your comment :) The way we see it Facebook Groups are one feature of a massive service. Which makes it hard for users to navigate the updates from their Groups, as they are mixed with all you friends status, pictures, etc in your timeline. A lot of people are also not comfortable (especially on more professional topics) to have their Facebook profile one click away from any members of a group on Facebook. So I'd say there is a difference of focus and philosophy.
@macsym Being part of fb is a blessing and a curse for fb groups. Curse because of the reasons you mention. Blessing because a billion+ people are always a click away. I've seen countless attempts to migrate FB groups to other platforms...haven't seen a successful migration yet (though I'm sure there are some examples out there). Engagement takes a massive dive, almost instantly when you move away from FB.
Congrats on the launch guys! I've seen the product evolved in a great direction lately, iteration after iteration, and quite a lot of engagement for a private beta. Now to the rest of the world :)
Hey guys, very cool website!
It appears that your product is very similar to Facebook Rooms that recently closed its doors after a year(https://www.facebook.com/help/ro...).
What's your plan to succeed - knowing that community is the main factor here - knowing that even Facebook didn't?
Cheers!
@widawskij Hi Jonathan, thanks a lot for your comment. Did you read this? https://medium.com/swlh/mobile-a... - It's one of the best article I've found about the saturation of the app market. Which I think played a lot in our decision to iterate on the web first. As you perfectly said it, even for giants like Facebook, pushing a new social app is difficult.
At Topick we decided to build a community first, with a few hundreds very engaged early users. So we have had the site in private beta for about 6 months. We believe this is our plan to succeed :) To make sure our communities are already regularly updated and with great conversations, before opening the site to a larger audience.
@ourielohayon Hi! We heard about Kifi for the first time from Ilan when Clement and I had been working on the service for a few months already :) We see Kifi more as a curation platform, if you look at their landing page. And we see ourselves more as platform for communities. We'll expand the type of post users can share in the future, differentiating ourselves even more from curation tools. As for the design itself, I'd let you be the judge of what is similar or not. Our design has almost always been the same, before we heard about Kifi.
I was impressed to see how the beta happened: super fast, a great community. Iterations were not about half-built features. Thanks @macsym and @cfaydi for not taking beta testers for bug killers :) I can't wait to welcome more people to discuss my favorite topicks! And I can't wait for the iPhone app :)
@solenema Thanks Solene for helping us shape the product in beta. We too can't wait for an app! But as you know, great products only happen with extreme focus :)
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@macsym I tweeted at you but will share some thoughts here as well - Kudos on having a refreshing interface. Love the concept. Respect the vision for community building. But, I think having the ability of making quick posts from a suggested list without thinking could lead to spamming. Making a post requires conscious effort and hence better odds of high quality. Also, you have optimized it for mobile. Why not take some extra steps and try out a basic app?
Hey @sarthakgh! Saw your tweet a few minutes ago :) To answer you: the Quick Posts feature is a current experiment but we still require people to write an into for everything they share. But I agree with you on keeping the quality up and that's been or focus for the past few months in private beta. That's why we have designed the platform so far so that our members could only post a URL and with an intro. As for the app, we are really in a phase where we need to iterate on our product quickly enough to find the right product market fit. Building a web platform (with a mobile version) gives us that flexibility. If we had to have an app right now, we'd spend days trying to keep up both our web and mobile versions synced and we'd wait for days to get a validation from Apple. So I guess it's more a question of timeline if that makes sense?
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Really cool stuff! I have been poking around it for the last hour or so and the UI is really clean. There is totally a need for better community spaces online.
Do you guys have any plans to integrate an easy way to create/suggest gatherings for a group? So if you know there are X number of people in Y city who are talking about a topic you could make/suggest a gathering happen (even eventually take care of the logistics and invites via integrations)? I think Reddit and Meetup are both examples of communities that use physical meetings to make an online community feel real and thus keep users involved.
Just something came to mind as I used the product. Thanks for posting!!
@eighttwo_three We have really good friends at Meetup, also based in NYC. And several of our users are Meetup organizers, so this is indeed an ongoing conversation :) - We need more time to figure out from a product perspective how the physical/online communities can support each other :)
@eighttwo_three Yup, IRL meetups are crucial, crucial piece of any community. "there are X number of people in Y city" --> that's a use case I can strongly identify with...it's essentially what our whole app is built for discovering.
Congrats on the launch! Really interested to see where you guys can take this. You already have a great community of super smart people. I've been impressed so far. Follow me on topik - http://topick.com/milesfitzgerald
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