Hey Hunters, we’re super excited to release the the public beta of Frisbee internationally and also introduce our new group video chat and selfie video reactions.
What’s Frisbee? Frisbee is a simple way to message with friends though video. Create a group and hold the camera to send them a frisbee! Friends can instantly throw a frisbee back, or whenever it's convenient. We’re building Frisbee because we want to enable people to intimately communicate with their close friends and loved ones through video. Video in many ways mirrors how we communicate in real life, which is face-to-face. We believe in the next few years the way we message each other and communicate as a whole will shift to video. Send a frisbee to start chatting!
Features:
• Group Video Chat: Just hold to record for up to 20 seconds and let go to throw the frisbee to your friends. Friends can watch instantly and throw a frisbee back. Videos won’t disappear, unless you want them to.
• Selfie GIF Reactions: React to friends' frisbees with selfie video reactions. Create new reactions by tapping on the emoji icon and recording a selfie GIF reaction you can use to react - once or as many times as you want - to your friends’ frisbees.
• All Your People, Right Here: Create groups for all the different groups in your life – best, the fam, roomies, classmates, coworkers, teammates – you name it. Add anyone! If they’re not on Frisbee, they’ll get an SMS letting them know they're in the group.
• Filters: Make sure you look good by swiping on the camera to add a filter to your videos.
Would love your feedback and how we can make Frisbee better!
👏🏼, @lavrusik!
This looks like an evolution of your live video streaming app,Alively. I'm curious what you learned from that app that went into Frisbee (awesome name, btw). It reminds me a bit of Meerkat's evolution into Houseparty. cc @benrubin
@rrhoover nice, yeah big fan of Houseparty and what @benrubin is doing over there. Was just chatting with him about this iteration a few weeks back.
You're right, Frisbee was an evolution of Alively. We saw an emerging behavior in Alively of people using it to communicate with one another, sending each other video messages, rather than as a tool for sharing and streaming live video. Communication requires all parties involved to engage, otherwise it's not a conversation. Whereas sharing can be a bit passive or one-way. With the emerging use case, we saw that people would start sending each other video messages back and forth, engaging in conversation (whereas sharing was much more passive). The other key thing that we learned from Alively users was that they loved the Groups feature, particularly college students, even though the feature was pretty buried in the Alively product.
As we started to dig into video for communication, there a couple of key insights. One is that video more accurately represents how we communicate in real life, which is face-to-face. This is why video chat feels so good to use because it's how we as humans are wired to communicate. So much of the data that our brains process is other people's faces. The internet has hacked this by making it primarily text-based, which is more impersonal and less authentic. Video enables us to express our emotions and true feelings in ways that text cannot.
The second is that the messaging platforms people typically use for chatting and sharing with small groups aren’t designed for video communication, and are pretty bad at it. Unlike social sharing platforms that have quickly evolved to meet people’s video-first demand, incumbent messaging platforms (e.g., WhatsApp, iMessage, Messenger) are still dominated by antiquated text-based communication and utility use cases. We started asking ourselves, what would WhatsApp have looked like if it was built in a video first world? That's where a lot of our core product principles came out of.
With Frisbee, we are providing intimacy not utility. Frisbee enables people to intimately communicate with one another through instant video messages in a shared space where they can feel safe to communicate authentically and share unfiltered moments with their close friends.
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No android = no bueno. I wish companies would dual release instead of alienating iOS or Android users when only developing for one platform.
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@bjlib70 i agree that it would be great to have, but many folks are working with constraints of capital, developers, time etc. I’m sure an Android version is on the way!
@bjlib70 it would be nice, but it makes sense for companies to focus on getting to product market fit ASAP. It's faster to iterate by developing on one platform only, and then port to Android when you have a product people love.
@bjlib70 To echo @daniellevine's point. It would be great to do both, but with a small team it slows you down especially when you're iterating fast and still figuring out the product market fit (as @sebfeed mentioned). Also, the demo that we were targeting in the US is primarily on iOS so it made more sense to start there.
@sebfeed We currently require you to create a group as part of on-boarding so that you don't have a blank experience. You basically can't try the app unless you create a messaging thread and we saw that users were most retained when they were part of a thread right away and could start messaging.
@lavrusik right on, makes sense if that step has a high completion rate
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Great execution indeed!
There's just one tiny small thing that bugs me on the homepage: the squad creation screen only shows profile pics. However, a lot of my friends don't typically use perfectly recognisable, well lit, close up photos of themselves as profile pics. This would make it hard to know who they are while adding them to a squad.
@gflandre You should also see their names, but nevertheless this design is going to change in the next release and will be a lot more usable. Let me know how else we could make the group creation easier. Stay tuned!
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Just tested it and I have a question.
Are you planning on making public profiles so anyone can join a public conversation?
I'd love to use frisbee to connect with my followers
@gonelf We've been primarily focused on the close-friends, family, significant others use cases. But the public use case is definitely something on our radar and something we'd like to expand to and support. Would love your thoughts on how you envision using it for conversations with followers.
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