Just a few comments regarding the branding, and the targeting of the app.
It seems like there's a dissonance between the target to teenagers and the overly childish illustrations and interactions in the app. There's a few reasons why Snapchat has achieved success in similar demographics, and a lot of it is related to: the social feedback loop, the mood set by the app, the esoteric milestones regarding filters and emojis assigned to users, amongst many others. The most important one, in my opinion, is the lack of verbose communication and emphasizing on spontaneous moments. There seems to be a lot of structure in Lifestage, lots of menus and different "faces". I'm curious to see how this plays out. It'll probably appeal to middle-schoolers more than high-schoolers.
Culturally, this reminds me of kawaii culture, and that has worked in a limited scope for brands like Sanrio, with Hello Kitty and Gudetama, but for different demographics.
Branding-wise, I feel the name Lifestage is best suited for a life insurance company or a retirement financial product, but not an app for teenagers in school.
@antonio_bustamante as a teen and someone who built products for teens I tend to agree with you. Telling kids here's a platform for you tends to be rejected. They'd rather take a platform and claim it as their own.
Overall I think your insights are super spot on.
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@antonio_bustamante I COMPLETELY agree with you. I am no teenager but there is something corny about the graphics that would put me off something like this instantly. The graphics look like they were designed for children between the ages of 5 and 8. There is something both corny and creepy about it. It asks for too much information in a way that feels intrusive. Compare this to Snapchat which has the "no one watching over you" disorienting design and DYI graphics.
@antonio_bustamante Diversity in perspectives, in intellectual capacity has been absolutely wasted on a higher scale really than even the dot com bubble when people were writing business plans on napkins and having a billion dollar iPO the next day.
The terrible and disappointing waste of promise is no more evident that this offering...Facebook's weakness and others has now more than ever become increasingly apparent.
They have simply acquired more companies and technology that makes up majority of their value than they have in their entire history build. Name something that makes Facebook "worth" $400 billion and you can point to an acquisitions....
Where a company's stock price would go up 3,000% because their website was updated. Remember 1998
No one here needs to be a genius to see the underlying systemic Issues that has been plaguing this industry for generations.
This problem we are shocked with will continue to happen with a God like complex that puts feelings over facts, they ignore actual real facts regarding even how our society is made up how the world works and they build and think and view the world in this privileged incubation like sack that resembles a womb and are called Gods even when they fail and they fail because consumers say they have failed me, not because this system this market says they have the market normally rewards this kind of behavior it has from the very beginning.
They keep constantly feeling as if it is absolutely ok to ask minorities, that also includes white women who still don't statistically get paid as much as men and who still don't advance their careers as much as
Men even if they are more qualified, to ask them for their perspectives without letting them take a powerful and empowering active role in the implementation.
Mark came out and said it before and recently that he doesn't think their is a diversity problem and doesn't want to lower the bar when their are so many minorities who are doing so much to push this world forward, but are disproportionally disconnected from even having a discussion and collaborating.
So what do you do when you can throw dirt at a wall and literally not care if it sticks and make billions in perceived value - over and over and over again? Without any type of diversified thinking challenging any of the valid points made today....You do it, simply because
You can and you are a God who answers to no one and simply cannot fail.
Once we get away from being misguided and salivating on TechCrunch articles and feedback loops that are really vanity we can then only then start to build something truly interesting that serves a real pure purpose and tries to add value and be someone people have been asking for
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@danielsing3r@antonio_bustamante couldn't agree more with both sentiments. The overall look and feel doesn't scream "teens" to me. Although I like what's trying to be done here
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@nicholassheriff " and I'm sorry but I can't comprehend, this doesn't really follow a coherent structure
@joshconstine as a good write-up, including some backstory on @michaelsayman, one of the youngest Facebook engineers hired, cc @carmeldea. The app is built for teens so I'm clearly not the target market, but curious to explore it more beyond the initial onboarding.
@michaelsayman - congrats, man. How long have you been working on it and can you share how the idea came together?
I love the fact that facebook hired a 19 year old to build an app for his age category.
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If I could downvote this to the maximum, I would because of the usual assumption that everyone on the internet is an American. Just search Twitter for the word "Americanisation" to see how hated this assumption is.
@nicholassheriff why don't you think it makes sense to first test a product in one market before expanding? Obviously it's going to be easier to test it in the geography you're in...
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@nicholassheriff Please pay attention Nicholas. Perhaps you meed to improve your English comprehension, how else could you have failed to notice my comment was not even about language.
@ianmayman Ian this was not at all on me my apologies for some reason my entire comment which was a few paragraphs went all over the place I was on vacation responding from my iphone and now realized Product Hunt is unusable on mobile, I'm guessing it's a bug they are hopefully working on fixing.
it screwed so much up, so many paragraphs are in the wrong place acting like I am replying to people I am not at all replying to.
Interesting to release this soon after Instagram Stories. I thought they'd stop making these type of apps when they shut down Creative Labs (Slingshot, Riff, Rooms, etc.) http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/...
Facebook started the same way. A school-only network. It's like the glory days, and then it opens to the public and parents get on board and then it's no longer cool, but I guess it's better to compete against yourself with multiple social apps, then have someone else cut into your share.
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