WhosDown is a mobile app where you can genuinely make friends—connecting with someone that shares a “common interest” in real-time. A common interest can be any activity like sports, gaming, shopping, or having coffee, you name it.
👋 Hi Hunters, my name is Yun. I am very excited to share my story today at Product Hunt.
While there are tons of dating apps out there, I could not find an app or service that I could use to make friends. I thought, why do all online meetings have to be so focused on dating? You might be committed to someone or want some break from non-stopping effort in the dating game. There gotta be something other than a dating app to make friends. 💡 That is how I started WhosDown.
WhosDown is a mobile app where you can genuinely make friends — connecting with someone that shares a “common interest”. A common interest can be any activity like sports, gaming, shopping, or having coffee, you name it. You can search for a like-minded friend who’s down for the activity, whether right now or later in the future.
Here are some use cases.
1. Sports 🏀 It’s Saturday afternoon, you and your friends are going to play basketball but you are short of people to play full court. You can use WhosDown to see if someone is down to join.
2. Workout buddy 🏋️♀️ You are going to a gym. You’d like to have someone who can spot you while lifting. It’s too cumbersome to arrange a set time with your friends. You can use WhosDown to see if someone’s like-minded at this moment.
3. New in town 🚚 You are new in town and it is a Friday night. You wanna go out and explore town but don’t know where to start. On WhosDown, you can search for someone who can show you around and grab a beer.
Possibility is endless. WhosDown is for people who are: ∙Bored and wanting to do something right now ∙New to town ∙Wanting to make friends ∙Got sick of dating apps that only allow meeting someone to date
If this sounds cool, please check out our iOS app here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wh....
Any kind of feedback is welcome. Thank you so much! ❤️
@yun_han1 There a lots of similar apps (Meetup.com, Band, Life Sports, etc) but they all miserably fail for the following reasons:
1. Covid causes people being afraid of physically meeting others.
2. People don't easily move from online to real life (the majority of people just want virtual friends)
3. People use social networks like Facebook or Instagram to look for new friends
I am an event organizer on Meetup.com and other apps and believe me, in a city as big as Tokyo meetups are mostly empty of participants. It's very depressing.
Neat idea! UX is a little tedious (why is each profile option such as birthday/gender its own page, and why do I have to select 3 categories instead of 1 or 2?).
Interested to see how you solve the underlying chicken&egg problem though, because although I immediately downloaded the app, it's not encouraging to find nothing nearby. Maybe an incentive for someone to create a meetup would help? I imagine there are quite a few people on the app, but most people end up seeing that there is nothing already organized nearby and leave immediately, instead of creating a meetup that shows a presence. Perhaps you could show the number of users in a given area (literally just a number, not identifying them) so that as a user I can see if there actually is enough people in my region to make it worth organizing something.
Really cool idea all things considered, and lots of room for interesting growth hacking!
Congrats on the launch! Products like this always interest me.
How are you planning to tackle the chicken & egg problem with this in terms of having users ready and willing to participate in meetups/activities so that new users don't arrive to an immediate ghost town?
@ryangilbert Thank you!
What you mentioned is indeed a common concern for any service with such nature. We are thinking about a rating system and phone verification of users so that users can earn credibility. But we are aware that this alone can’t make perfect. Any good idea you can suggest?
upvote for the good idea and nice design! Would have loved to try on android :) Take a look on couchsurfing hangouts and try to avoid the mistakes they make ;)
@phoheisel Thank you for the advice. Since WhosDown also leads to offline meetups, such things are our concerns as well. We will study the case of couchsurfing hangouts.
We have received number of inquiries for Android version, will let you know once we have it! :D
Heard people are getting emotionally distanced from even their close friends due to COVID. This is an amazing idea. Good Luck!
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@yun_han1 Congratulations on the launch!! This is a fantastic product. Loving all the activities that you have listed. I will definitely give this a try. All the very best for this :D
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This type of app come and go so I’m hoping you find a potential differentiator . Maybe a built-in sudoku/wordle, a task field where people can post what they are trying to achieve like run half marathon with a comment section, seek a guest pass to a gym, use your common space for Scrabble etc.
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