Expa is always experimenting and trying out new things and today I am happy to tell you all about Bunch, a new take on using video to stay in touch with your closest friends.
It’s been fun to watch the team behind Bunch test and iterate on the product and get ready to share it with the outside world. Feedback and questions welcomed to this team!
@ericfriedman
Thanks for hunting Bunch, Eric!! Much love!
Bunch is a really quick, easy, and personal way to connect to the closest people in your life. It's 8 people, sort of the same concept as your speed dial list. Tap and hold to record, release to send. :)
I’m loving the experience with my family overseas, and my mum is loving the simplicity of it. Bunch is something we built in just a little over 3 weeks and are really passionate about. Overall I’ve been really humbled by the process and our team’s drive on this and really proud of what we’ve put out there.
Thanks again, and we welcome any questions or feedback. Product Hunt is an awesome community.
It's super impressive this went from idea to app store in 3 wks.
I wonder if you'll go in a direction of being able to create multiple bunches like "work bunch," "family bunch," "play bunch" etc. But for now having fun with Top 8 as a constraint. Nice work!
@mslagh That's a really cool idea. I like it a lot. Something we're struggling with is people who 'fill up their bunch' hastily to play around with it, see the features etc. and then are left with people they don't actually want to communicate with in their top 8. Thanks!!!
@mslagh I had the same exact feedback playing with the early versions of the app. Very interesting things can happen with this product. Love the #hustle the team has as well!
I love that it's top 8. I already jokingly told a friend yesterday after recommending Bunch that I wasn't sure if they would make it into my top 8... Awkward. But fantastic.
Great app. Way to go Bunch team!
@cbkirk Hahaha thanks Chris for your support!! I have a friend who said the same thing... I was the only person in his Bunch and he STILL considered demoting me!
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3 weeks after you get the idea? That is sure impressive!
I like the idea, but I would like to know if there is a difference between Bunch and Tribe (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...) apart from the 8 people thing (I think Tribe was about 5 people at first)?
Do you plan to evolve your app in a similar way Tribe and Messenger done?
@juanggz heya, yeh evolution is all part of the process. We actually started talking about Bunch (conceptually) several months ago. The original concept was a 1 to 1 messenger—an app where you could only talk to another person. When we shared the initial concept to our team and some friends, we got feedback that messaging only one person may not be enough. There were several use cases where it would be completely impractical to only message one person. An example would be my girlfriend—she has two sisters that she talks to all the time, and it would be challenging for her to use an app with so many limitations.
We picked 8 because we found that we only facetimed and video messaged a small handful of people... and also the number 8, conveniently works with a grid. Some of our beta users have already expressed that they want more. Hopefully we can extract and apply the best insights on the go forward.
And yes, Tribe was one of my biggest inspirations (along with Snapchat and Facetime). I love their design; however, we all probably should give a little hat tip to Pasquale (designer of Keezy) for sparking this grid style interface.
Tribe's messaging experience is awesome, but after using it for a while, there was a lot left to be desired. There are a couple of differences that we innovated on:
a) When you get a message on Tribe, you can't send a message back to your friend unless you watch the message first. Bunch enables you to press and hold above the notification bubble to send a message.
b) There's no way to reply on Tribe... so you have to watch every message before you can send something. Bunch enables you to reply when you're watching a message by pressing and holding anywhere. When you send a message, it includes a small preview of the previous message to help give some context if you're having a conversation. I hope that everyone gets to experience this part of the app—it's what I love the most.
c) When you get a message on Tribe, the position of a user moves around. This was challenging because the person I messaged the most always appeared in the top right hand corner (furthest away from my thumb). Bunch enables you to customize your grid, so you can tweak how you use the app.
The foundation of press-hold-release borrows heavily from Tribe, but we're already finding that messaging can be even faster. For example, if you send 10 messages back to back, the 3 second countdown adds another 30 seconds to your messaging experience. We're already playing around with faster ways to message. Bunch will certainly evolve, and hopefully this will be a springboard from which we can learn from.
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@jeffrey_wong That's a great explaination you gave me there and I agree on every topics you talked about!
You can definitely count me as one of your fellow user during the following days! I wish you the best and I'm really interested to see where you're going next with Bunch! :)
@evannite we're still playing in the space with a handful of projects like Flare and Bunch. There's a lot to explore and experiment with, and instead of jamming features into Flare we thought we'd be better off trying some standalone stuff. It's a conscious effort to be more experimental as a team, within the photo/video sharing space that we've learned a lot about. Thanks for the great question!
I've been playing with this app a bunch (yuck yuck) since it first showed up on the app store, and I think it's a ton of fun, especially for cantankerous folks like myself who don't want to be part of yet another social network, and just want a quick, fun, disposable way to say hi to my closest friends and family regularly. Love that it's so simple and isn't trying to do too much.
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