What if your instant-message service was as social as Facebook or Instagram? Lots of smart people chasing that right now. Last week I saw a Boston startup team that is coming closer to it than any other thing I've seen.
Joe Cerra and Sam Shorr say they started their company, HeyNow, as an art project. Anyone who ever tried out Vlingo's virtual assistant (before Nuance gobbled it up in 2012) knows Cerra's pedigree with UX design. While Cerra was co-founding Vlingo, Shorr was working on retail and Web design at a string of ventures based on Boston's North Shore. The two met at Start Tank, PayPal's incubator in Boston, where Cerra was working on Wyth, a calendar startup. After a long conversation about design principles they decided they needed to work together on something new. Cerra left Wyth in January and the HeyNow project began.
"I was bringing calendar into messaging and private social networks," Cerra said. "Sam was thinking about how you consume content. We realized the messaging app was where you had to live."
Facebook itself has been trying to build a more social messaging app with Facebook Messenger. If you've used it, you have a sense of what the Book is after. The experience is a big step beyond what you find in phone carriers' text-message services--or in WhatsApp, which Facebook also owns. It has some of Facebook's feel of sharing ideas, good reads, video, photos, music, etc.--bridging the gap between the public social network and more intimate conversations that you carry on every day.
What Cerra and Shorr have built in HeyNow has similar appeal, but it's another step beyond. This has it over Facebook Messenger like Slack has it all over G-chat, but it's not necessarily for work.
How HeyNow started.
Cerra and Shorr first connected on a couple of design principles. One was about what it means to be well designed: "Not only is the product you're building useful, it also brings you joy," Shorr said. Another was about how people use social networks.
"I post something on Instagram not for my followers, but for myself," Shorr said. "In messaging, everything is meant for you (the recipient)."
The power of those hand-picked, personal shares is why people are starting to figure out how to measure the Internet traffic that flows through mobile messaging services.
There are no buttons in HeyNow. Picking chat recipients is super easy. And then there's "Throwback."
Here's my view, from what Cerra and Shorr showed me on their phones one day in Start Tank: There are 3 things that set HeyNow apart from Messenger and other social messaging apps:
- "Whisper." In HeyNow, you can break group chats into smaller groups for a quick aside. Example: A friend just shared an image with the group and you want to break off with two other friends (or colleagues) to talk about it privately. HeyNow makes that pretty easy. (Slack: Figure this out right now.)
- It's better at saving your favorites: Facebook Messenger is better than SMS at storing favorite images (no more scrolling). HeyNow lets you get at them with a swipe. "Keepers" are favorited songs (Spotify API), images, videos and links exchanged between you and a friend you're chatting with. They live right behind the chat in progress.
- Better gestures. All around, HeyNow takes better advantage of the gesture capabilities embedded in your iPhone. (An Android version is coming later.) There are no buttons in HeyNow. Picking chat recipients is super easy. And then there's "Throwback."
In Throwback mode, you turn the phone sideways and it switches from chat to use the camera or pick media from the phone's gallery. One VC, who's known to prize design over business model, called it "gangsta mode." Presumably that's a reference to the pistol-gripping style favored by actors playing gangsters in movies.
Whether you want to use that nickname or not, Throwback is a slick gesture. Flip the phone sideways, click and send a photo to your friends--or just to two of your friends. We've already seen the appeal of novel gestures with Line's 400-million-plus Asian users. Line is best known for letting users make and sell their own emoji stickers. But the app's "shake it" feature lets you discover nearby friends. You do have to click a couple of buttons, though. Throwback is more intuitive, easier and it compasses a more basic messaging function.
"It's the last-mover's advantage: None of these companies are executing....The future is not going to be stickers."
Here's a twist: If the photo you share is great, it becomes a permanent part of the Keepers album you're building as part of that conversation. If not, it might go away forever. In the new version of what Shorr and Cerra are working on, anything you save in your Keepers is permanent. Anything else--a one-liner, photo, image, song, screen grab, etc.--will disappear after about 10 days. It's a self-destruct timer that Cerra and Shorr say is more Evernote than Snapchat: It's designed to cut down on clutter, rather than protect from exposure.
Another feature they're working on for the next release: Clock synch lets users in a group synchronize Spotify tracks in real time. So, you're skiing with friends and you want "Hell's Bells" as the soundtrack? Wait for AC/DC to come out on Spotify, nerds. Anything else, knock yourself out.
You have to admire a couple of entrepreneurs like Cerra and Shorr, heads-down on a project like this--but Line and WeChat each have more than 400 million users. WhatsApp has more than 500 million. That's about a fifth of the world's population spoken for.
"It's the last-mover's advantage: None of these companies are executing," Shorr told me. "The future is not going to be stickers."
