I find the pitch story compelling and the idea intriguing, but having people download an app for it strikes me as frictional and a bit invasive.
Essentially you are asking me to volunteer relationships that are usually in a somewhat fragile state (i.e. valued but undermaintained) to some impersonal external system that's going to send growth-hack-like e-mails to them and ask them to download apps.
How about something more akin to a personal CRM app where I could unilaterally enter some of my friends and it could help me maintain engagement through reminders or scheduling assistance (or say, location awareness?). I would have downloaded that in a second, and I would posit that a lot of others would as well since most people strongly identify with the "people I wish I had kept in touch more" message.
Monetization might later come in from the business angle to the same idea (maintain engagement with valuable contacts, using only an app).
Great questions! We need to do a better job of answering these questions in the product itself, and we will. For now, here are our answers to your specific concerns:
a) We are not going to send any emails or texts to anyone from your contacts. Apps like Gather / IRL spam people for growth, and we would rather earn your trust and grow slowly.
b) You can use Millow without ever inviting anyone else on. It can be used in a 100% single-player mode, where it will do exactly what you said. You can set reminders for your close friends, and Millow will send you a push notification once a week (Sunday afternoon in your device's time zone) to remind you about the friends that you're set to meet this week (it won't send a push reminder if there are none).
c) Monetization isn't something we're particularly concerned with in the immediate future (we are a team of two, and have sufficient savings from the acquisition of my previous startup Screenhero by Slack), and we are doing this mainly because we believe in the social impact of what we're doing. We do have plans for future monetization (e.g. if we help you make a plan to meet up with a friend at a local restaurant, the restaurant pays us similarly to OpenTable).
Happy to chat more, here or via email (support@millow.app). We're a two person team, and are eager for learning more and improving.
Good freakin Lord! I've been searching for this app for years now! Thank you so much for doing this!
Brett and Kate McKay at ArtOfManliness.com have talked about these 'relationships that don't scale' [0] for a while now. CRM software is perfect for those kinds of friendships, but it always costs too much (~$1/day typically). You app is PERFECT for what I have been looking for! Thank you!
This is exactly the kind of thinking that led us to create Millow! Please feel free to reach out to us directly if you have feedback in the future, we'd love to hear from you, as you're our ideal user.
> How about something more akin to a personal CRM app where I could unilaterally enter some of my friends and it could help me maintain engagement through reminders or scheduling assistance (or say, location awareness?). I would have downloaded that in a second, and I would posit that a lot of others would as well since most people strongly identify with the "people I wish I had kept in touch more" message.
There is an open source software called Monica[1] that does what you are asking if my interpretation is correct. I have no affiliation with said software, it appeared in [Show HN] some time ago (I think) and while reading your comment I remembered it.
Likewise! I would love to have a "personal CRM" if it was well done. Preferably integrated with my phone's contact database, but also usable via my computer with a real keyboard.
We looked at alternatives and chose to go a much more minimalistic route with Millow. It does just a few things:
1) Single-player: set reminders for when to meet friends, and log when you do
2) Multi-player: share your availability with friends you add, and see theirs (if they add you), so you can find times to meet. Especially helpful when time-zones are involved (we show you their availability overlaid on your time zone.
Other apps do a lot more, but in our opinion, are a lot more complicated. We wanted to create a much simpler alternative and iterate based on feedback — so we'd love to hear what you think, especially since you're interested in trying one or more of these apps out.
We are a personal CRM, but most consumers don't know what "CRM" means, so we stayed away from that language. It integrates optionally with your phone's contact database (we only import one contact at a time for now), or you can add contacts manually. We're currently iOS and Android only, but in the future will add support for desktop if there's interest (and it sounds like there is a lot of interest from what folks are saying here!).
"personal CRM" - this fits exactly with what followup.cc is doing and what you described. The only downside is that it only works with GMail and Chrome(mium).
"How about something more akin to a personal CRM app where I could unilaterally enter some of my friends and it could help me maintain engagement through reminders or scheduling assistance"
Exactly this. That's precisely what I was assuming/hoping it would be when I clicked the link. I don't want another social media site or app. I already am basically a ghost on most of the web and don't use any social media sites. HN is the only exception and for a while now it has been the only site I post anything on. I like it that way and don't want something where I have to "connect" to people on and invite them to also use for it to be useful.
EDIT: I just saw some comments below and it appears my assumptions and understanding of the product based on the site were incorrect. It apparently does have "single-player mode" where I can do what I hoped for. Will give it a shot. Note to the developer - this ability is definitely not clear based on the app's website.
The learn more page is brilliant and insightful. I haven't heard the term "commemorative friends" before and I agree that this is a real problem with Facebook (they have many, but the bottom line is they just fucked up the signal to noise ratio in order to make an extra buck, and they're on the defensive because of it now).
So I agree there's a real problem here that needs solving (help me nurture the relationships that really matter, protect me from attempts to distract me while I do this). But I wouldn't install an app for it under any circumstances, my engagement with the brand ends immediately when I realize that has to happen. The industry has simply betrayed our trust too many times. It doesn't help that most people already have too many apps on their phone and are trying to cut those down a bit. This is a challenge for newcomers I know but it's real.
Maybe do a web version and make it feel more like a personal productivity tool than a social network. I don't mean make it about being productive, but social media has such a stink at this point and is so synonymous with "creep garbage into my life after hitting critical mass" that I would try a different positioning.
We will eventually do a web version (perhaps sooner than we'd originally imagined, based on feedback here!).
At a high level, we want to be a tool that you use for a few minutes at the most, perhaps not even daily. But as long as we're able to help you get out into the real world and meet / call your friends, we will have achieved our objective.
We aren't a social network — we have no feed, and employ no growth hacks (we would love for you to invite your friends because you want to). We don't consider ourselves social media either. We're a tool closer to your calendar app than to your Facebook/Instagram.
When we spoke with our initial users (friends and family), we found that there were two main reasons why people didn't stay in touch with others as much as they'd like:
1) They weren't sure if the other person (typically a dormant friend) was interested in staying in touch
2) They weren't sure when the other person was free (especially if time zones were an issue)
This is why we added the ability to share your availability with your close friends — our first 'multi-player' feature. Everything else can be used standalone ('single-player') — in fact, you could even manually add contacts without even putting in their phone number if you so choose.
I'm curious to hear how you feel about the app if you were to try it and use it. Please do reach out to us (support@millow.app) if you're up for it — we're a two person team and are eager to engage with our users (and potential ones), and are especially interested in critical feedback!
First, we will never use your personal information for advertising. We want to be a personal productivity app, and not a social network.
On the specifics of your question, there are two ways to use the app:
1) Single-player mode: you add a contact (either imported from your contact list, or typed in manually by you) and set reminders for when to meet, and log when you do
(You could do this via manually adding contacts and be sure that none of your social graph / personal information is put out there at all, other than your phone number for account verification)
2) Multi-player mode: share your availability with your inner circle. You need to use real phone numbers for this, so we can verify your friends if/when they join (note: we won't contact them to join, that's on you) so we ensure we're only sharing your availability info with verified friends you've added.
Why is this different from all of the other "stay connected with your true circle of friends" apps that we (as a tech-based community) keep pumping out as The Answer to Social Media™?
We haven't found any apps that did exactly what we're doing:
1) Single-player mode: let you add friends in manually, set reminders and log when you do meet or call
2) Multi-player mode: let you share availability with your inner circle (and vice versa) so you can more easily find times to meet or call (especially useful across time zones)
We want Millow to be simple and focused on a very short list of use cases, rather than trying to do too much.
In the future, if we're able to help people make plans to meet up with their friends, we envision being able to help make reservations at local restaurants (also helping local economies thrive), and making a small amount of money from the restaurant. Unlike Facebook, we don't want hours of your attention — we want you to get in the app, and get out, and live your life with the people that matter.
If you were asking about our specific practices w.r.t. contacts, we only import 1 contact at a time when you pick one from your list, and if you prefer to not give access to your contact list, you can manually type in your contacts too.
1. It sets a frontier between your “true” friends and others. What if I don’t like someone anymore but don’t want to offend by removing them from my Millow? What if someone wants to add me but I don’t think of them as close enough to be on mine?
2. I personally do this on Line and WhatsApp. So I really don’t feel like adding yet another social app
3. The reminder part is weird, if they really are close friends, I don’t need a reminder to call them. So this feels more a “remember to call grandma”.
1. You can use Millow (in "single-player" mode) without anyone ever seeing you've added them. You can set reminders for a friend, and log when you meet. This is all private, and won't ever be visible to anyone other than you.
The only feature in the app that currently changes if you've added someone is the "availability" feature. So if you add your availability, and you add someone as a friend, and they add you as a friend, and they see your availability, and then you remove them as a friend, they will cease to be able to see your availability. However, this experience is also identical to the act of deleting your account. So your friend may just think you deleted your account. But yes, your point is still valid, and we don't have a great answer for this. At the end of the day, we want you to only add friends that really matter, and if someone ceases to matter, there's really no easy way for our product to help with the difficult conversation you may have to have.
2. Fair enough! We designed the app for those that need help, so we're happy for you that you're doing this already :)
3. The research (which we mentioned in our learn more section) talks about dormant friends that you would want to reconnect with, but aren't actively in your life. I grew up in Pakistan, and many of my best friends still live there, but now that I'm in California, I don't get a chance to reconnect with them anywhere as often as I'd like. And I also don't know when they're free. Also, even for friends that are local, sometimes life just happens and a lot of time goes by before people meet up. If you don't have friends of this sort, that's great, but this is an issue that many people face, and they're the app's target audience.
Here's my question off the bat: Facebook is known for using Onavo to find networks that take off and then buying them (I forget names - tbh was it?). I know of course this early in the process you don't know what the future holds, but are you open to acquisition by Facebook? I place a very high value on using the product depending on that answer.
Great question! Prior to Millow, I built Screenhero, which was then acquired by Slack (my team and I built Slack voice/video/screen sharing). Working at Slack was a great experience, and I love the company and the product (and use it with all my current projects, I have 14 Slack workspaces in my sidebar!).
Why is this relevant to your question? For two reasons:
1) Financially, we (we're a husband & wife team) have a very long runway. We own 100% of the company, and have no plans to take on venture capital. Our financial situation means we're also under no pressure to monetize, and we are doing what we're doing because we believe in the mission of our company and product. We want to have stronger connections to our friends and family, and we want that for society at large. Of the 10,000 other things we could have chosen to do, we chose this, because we believe it is the most important thing for us to do.
2) Acquisition is neither a goal nor an option for us. We want to stay independent, build what we want to build, with our users being our only North Star. If Facebook did acquire us, we would a) no longer be independent, b) no longer own the destiny of our product, c) be slightly more financially well off, but (c) is not worth (a) and (b) to us. After a certain point, money ceases to add value to one's life — it's in the study we quoted in our "learn more" section! We're building Millow because we believe in the mission, not because we wanted to make $$$ (if we did, I'd have done another SaaS B2B company like Screenhero).
Also, Millow is in many ways the antithesis of Facebook. Facebook believes connecting people is inherently a good thing — and the more connections, the better. We disagree! Too many low-value connections make it harder for us to focus on those that really matter. This fundamental mismatch in vision makes us believe that the only way for us to get the impact we want is to stay independent forever.
Happy to chat more. This is a topic I have strong opinions on :)
Thank you for the great and detailed answer. I feel very strongly about using Facebook and since this app would focus on people I am close to, a future FB acquisition would mean more of my info in FB’s hands. I support acquisitions, just that my personal trust matrix has an FB exclusion zone.
I replied to the parent comment, but here's my response to your particular number.
Thanks to my previous company's acquisition, we are financially set. More money at this point won't mean much to us. Instead, being able to have a positive impact on the world is what really drives us. Hopefully, this is visible from what we've written, and what we've built (there are no growth-hack-y, spam-your-friends "features" in our app). And in the coming months, we'll continue to expand on this vision in our product. We hope you'll use the product so you can see this for yourself.
To be clear, I am not saying they shouldn’t be acquired - if they get acquired by Twitter/Microsoft/AANG I am totally going to be a supportive user. It is the F word I consider unworthy.
On acquisition, we would cease to be in charge of our destiny, whether by FB or by Twitter/MSFT/AANG [1]. If we're successful in our product & business strategy, we'll stay independent forever, and will monetize through restaurant reservations at local businesses when we help you make a plan to meet up with your friend. Glad to hear you'd be a supportive user even if we were acquired, but we'd like to keep a direct relationship with you ourselves and never be acquired :)
I'm really glad that you pushed out this app, I was looking for something like this. On the other hand, I'm really curious about how you'll make money. I signed up, but if you were asking for some money (either monthly or app purchase fee), I'd feel more secure.
We just added a section to our 'learn more' page to address this important question:
>Millow is not a social network. There is no feed, and no advertising. We designed Millow to be used no more than a few minutes each week. We eventually hope to sustain our business by helping you make reservations at local restaurants and businesses, and making a sliver of revenue from such transactions. This is in support of our goal to stay independent as a company, so we can continue to provide this product for perpetuity, and maintain our focus on our mission of helping you stay connected to your inner circle.
Looks good, and I really appreciate the "single player mode"! (My friends don't need to know that I'm socially inept enough to need an app like this...)
I alos love the name, assuming it's from the Hindi word for "meet"?
I like the idea, reminds me of the "Smart Contact Reminder" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.barta.stayi...) app for Android. Too bad this one is not available for Android (yet?). However, there is definitely a market for a Personal CRM like this. Desktop access would be great. Maybe even like a web-app like Tinyblue (https://tinyblu.com)?
So glad you like the app! We really wanted to encourage more human-to-human connection and get people spending less time on social media. We're hoping that Millow can do that :)
Re: permission to access contacts: we're strongly against spamming your contacts (we've had our own negative experiences with apps that do). If you prefer to not give permission to contacts, you can always add friends manually.
When you add a friend to Millow, it lets us know you trust this person and are open to sharing your availability with them (availability is a feature in Millow). If someone you didn't add as a friend adds you to their Millow account, they are not able to see your availability because you did not add them as a friend on your account. We also do not let people know if they have been added to your Millow account, as we feel this is private information.
You can always opt to not share your availability as well, but we have found it helps people break down barriers for communication in different time-zones.
Given the strong preference for desktop/web access here on HN, we will likely be prioritizing this feature earlier than we were before!
Happy to discuss more at support@millow.app and thanks again for the feedback!
I think this is a great start. I like the scheduled time to connect, but I want the opposite: a notification that RIGHT NOW I'm free and if folks wanna yak I'm up for it. I sometimes find myself stuck in traffic, or driving way out to an airport, and I'd love to opportunistically fill that time with a great convo, but don't want to spam the world with my availability, or come off as rude (hey, i'll talk to anyone!); maybe sharing this smaller tight-friend community would allow that to not be weird :)
This is a great idea, and one we'll get to once we have enough of a user base. The critical mass requirement for a synchronous "now" experience is much higher than for an asynchronous one, so stage 1 is to build a user base, so that we can support this in stage 2.
That was how my friend group used to employ Dodgeball, back before Google acquired it and sucked all the utility out. It was really magical, getting a constant stream of ambient, no-pressure invitations to random gatherings of friends.
Sounds good, but count me out if there's no way to access it from desktop. I wouldn't use Facebook, Twitter, etc. if I couldn't access it from a normal browser too.
We’ll open up desktop access if there’s sufficient demand. We’re a team of two and we wanted to focus on mobile first and not dilute our efforts trying to work on too many platforms early on, but can definitely do this in the future.
Update: we just pushed out an update that enables access from web (essentially a desktop-friendly version of the mobile site). Let us know what you think!
We aren't a social network. We're a productivity tool like your calendar app, with just a few product tweaks to help you stay connected to your close friends if you're having trouble doing so. If you're already in touch with everyone you want to be in touch with, that's awesome! :)
If you have some people in your life that you wish you were more in touch with, but aren't either because you feel you're too busy, or because of distance, that's where Millow can help.
Ah, great just saw the 'android' and 'web' links. I'm sure it didn't say that yesterday...
Without a direct APK download I'll give it a miss, thanks. But it's a great concept. I supplied my phone number (why?) to try out the web version but it's clearly designed for touch-screens, not mice.
I did discover Monica from elsewhere in this thread, which looks like a good fit.
Looks awesome, I appreciate the simple signup and signin process. One tiny bug report: the signout button is misaligned vertically on an iPhone 8 in portrait mode. The button still functions properly.
I'd be really interested in purchasing something like this as an Outlook add-in. I try to keep all my contacts in Outlook and synced/backed up with CalDav.
For the ultra-private, we've made it possible for you to add people without actually sharing access to your contact list — just choose the 'add manually' option when adding a friend, and enter anything you want for their name/phone number. The app will still work as a single-player option.
There's only one feature you'll miss in this case. You just won't be able to share availability with someone unless they log in with the same phone number as what you've got stored in your contacts. This is to ensure that only friends you add are able to see your availability.
Here's a counter-example. For folks that do intermittent fasting, there's the need to track when you start and stop your fast. It sounds like a simple stopwatch app would solve this problem.
Apps designed for specific purposes often trump general purpose apps that don't focus. We feel this is a similar space where a specific kind of solution is better than a general purpose one.
According to the CSS the font is supposed to be "Helvetica Neue", but the user may not have it installed. For me I get the Firefox default "Times New Roman" instead.
Hi there – I'm Ashley, one of the two Cofounders at Millow. Thanks for pointing this out! The font should be Helvetica Neue and we're wondering which browser you might be using? It'll help us identify the problem so we can fix the issue immediately :) Thanks!
Helvetica is not pre-installed on Windows PCs and other non Apple devices.
You need to include Sans-Serif in your CSS - so the default sans serif font is picked for non Apple devices. Or be more specific and list Arial, Segoe UI, Calibri etc
There are still tons of Windows users out there, so worth checking on non Apple devices.
Essentially you are asking me to volunteer relationships that are usually in a somewhat fragile state (i.e. valued but undermaintained) to some impersonal external system that's going to send growth-hack-like e-mails to them and ask them to download apps.
How about something more akin to a personal CRM app where I could unilaterally enter some of my friends and it could help me maintain engagement through reminders or scheduling assistance (or say, location awareness?). I would have downloaded that in a second, and I would posit that a lot of others would as well since most people strongly identify with the "people I wish I had kept in touch more" message.
Monetization might later come in from the business angle to the same idea (maintain engagement with valuable contacts, using only an app).