miniDot

@jeff_osborn miniDot is not a new app from the group up but a transformed one with all the precious lessons we’ve learnt from our last app. It’s our observation that users would make new friends easily by sharing personal stories rather than developing relationships. By providing interesting daily prompts, we not only nudge users into capturing their life moments successfully(some even kept sharing stories for more than 1 year!) but hooked users by helping them built deeper and more genuine connections with new friends (yes, most of our users enjoy revealing true feelings and thoughts with people they don't really know rather than their friends or families.) There’s no denying that there are so many COOL social networking or dating services now, but just spend couples of minutes to think about this: can any service help users build new connections like this: no one cares about your gender, age, occupation, social status, income level, how you look, where you come from...all those cliché you really want to get rid of and ONLY STORY MATTERS? I think the answer would be NO. You might not find exciting romance or hookups in miniDot, but you will definitely feel relaxed and comfortable to share personal stories and make new connections with people who really care about HOW YOU THINK & FEEL. That’s why we would love to define miniDot as “friend-making apps.” If you haven't experienced connections like this, just get miniDot and start sharing stories, and we are looking forward to reading yours! Thanks you so much. :-)

@chikuwa Thank you for the detailed response. I have a pretty good grasp about what you guys are building -- and it sounds interesting! I asked the question because your website says Mini-Dot is a "game-changer for friend-making apps". That line suggests there are other friend-making apps. Your approach, as described above, reminds me of a dating app that recently shuttered called Siren. They tried to spark conversation by sharing a daily question. I'm friends with one of its early employees and she told me years ago Siren was perfect for meeting people and making friends, even though they were branding it as a dating app. If you're interested in learning more about Siren's journey to inform your own, here's a good place to start (their end): https://www.geekwire.com/2017/da... I love your approach of facilitating new friendships rather than trying to focus only on dating. That opens things up for you and addresses a real need (there are already plenty of dating apps). I'll be interested to see where your team takes it from here!

@jeff_osborn Thanks for your feedback again. According to our observations, it seems that most social network services nowadays can only connect people they already know, for those who have graduated from schools or over 30 years old, it's harder and harder for them to meet new people, and the best way to meet new people might be via dating apps. However, different purposes lead to different results and complains about scams, bots, harassment and ineffective matches are everywhere. We’ve checked out Siren and felt sorry that they’ve closed their doors in April 2017. I think we all start with good intentions to help people make new connections in a more meaningful and insightful way, maybe things won’t always work as we expect, all we can do is try our best to leave no regrets behind. Thanks for your encouragement, we will keep moving on. Hopefully we can prove that this kind of approach still work and people can really connect by sharing personal stories rather than selfies very soon. :-)

@chikuwa Makes sense! I mentioned Siren because the idea has promise and there's a lot to learn from those who tried and failed. You didn't ask for my advice, but here it is anyway: If I were you I'd reach out to Siren's founders and talk to them as much as possible. I might even try to get them on board as advisors. No one is going to give you better advice. Best of luck and I'll keep tabs to see where everything goes!

@jeff_osborn In fact, I’m trying to learn more about Siren app to know the whole story. Honestly speaking, it never occurred to us that we could ask for advices from the founders, this is really a fantastic idea and we will try to reach out to them. Thanks for your great tips again! :-)

@sunderls Really glad to know that you’ve tried miniDot and would love to spend some time sharing your valuable comments with us. Below are some feedback from us: 1. About the logo design: in fact, it should look like a M for Minidot. And yes we have to admit that the relationship between the logo and the name seems not strong enough, we will try to make it better. 2. For new users: thanks for your suggestions, in fact, currently we are working on Trending page which will allow people to read/write more stories. But it would take a few time to deliver this feature; so a workaround would be provided for the next release: you can write more stories while browsing prompts you've never written before. 3. For the limitation of the length of stories, of course we are always looking forward to read so-called GOOD STORIES, but all stories are written equal to us. We don't want users to make up things to please others, instead we want them to capture their life moments. As long as people would love to write and share, even one sentence could mean the world to the writers themselves. All we can do is provide as many inspiring and interesting prompts as we can to nudge people into writing their personal stories. miniDot isn’t a story competition platform and it's our deep belief that every story will eventually find the one who can relate. Thanks for your comments, they are really helpful and we are looking forward to hearing more! :-)

@meineleserei Yes, currently only for iOS T____T

@meineleserei As a tiny team of one engineer and one designer, currently we can only focus on iOS version first. Sorry for any inconvenience, dear Android users. If miniDot gets popular, we might get more resources to work on Android and even Web versions, please don't hesitate to share miniDot with your iPhone friends. Thank you so much. :-)

@chikuwa @yc_chen Yes, miniDot is still active! You can just download it from App Store https://itunes.apple.com/app/min... Also, we have a Instagram account to feature the great stories from miniDot, please check https://www.instagram.com/minido...