I'm an introvert and socially anxious, but I do enjoy hanging out with my friends. I just HATE the invitation-and-coordination game. If someone invites me and I don't want to go, I hate having to come up with a socially acceptable excuse. Inviting someone and waiting for them to make a socially acceptable excuse is equally awful to me.
Then you get to coordination. I want to go to the brewery at 2pm, but your kid has soccer practice so you can't get there til 3:30, but then Joe has to leave at 4 to pick up his mother in law at the airport, and... ugh. It's the worst.
So I made Holler, which is basically you hollering to your friends, "I'm going to be at the farmer's market at 2pm," and then you just go. If they show up, fantastic. If not, whatever, you were going to go anyway.
No coordination, no invitations, no friction. Just holler and go.
It's iOS only for now, but I'm working on an Android app as you read this, so hopefully that's coming soon.
That seems like the kind of "social app" that might actually work for me. I like the idea of sort of passively declaring "i am doing something, feel free to show up."
I guess the potential failure mode is ... no one ever showing up. I've got a standing slot (during work hours) at my current company where it's just "AI Jam" - just come in, eat lunch, and we'll hack on something, ramble about the news, etc. It's been moderately successful but there are definitely weeks where you just end up in a call with one or two guys with nothing to show.
That's not so bad though - last week we just talked about video games. Still fun.
Yeah, I get that. My thinking is that I'd rather go do something fun by myself than sit at home because I couldn't coordinate something or because someone else didn't want to do my thing.
This weekend, for example, another couple invited my partner and me to go do an activity. They sent the text at 11. We finished giving our kid lunch, walked the dog, and loaded up the car. They texted and said their kid wasn't ready yet, and maybe they'd leave by 2. They didn't leave home til 2:30, so we didn't start our activity until noon, almost three hours later. The activity lasted about an hour, then we suggested going to a brewery to get some drinks, but for one reason or another, we wound up going our separate ways.
My partner looked at me and said "This would've been a better Holler use-case. We could've just gone for a hike ourselves and not had to coordinate with someone else who can't show up on time."
Sure, it might've just been us, but we spent a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth coordinating with people that we ultimately barely spent any time with, and instead lost half our day.
Holler, to me, represents a form of social freedom. I'm freed from the constraints of other peoples' calendars. If they really want to hang out with me, they'll come to the events I holler. If they don't, then that's fine, we can still be friends, but if they can't be willing to attend things on my schedule, why should I adjust my schedule to conform with theirs?
So I'm going to do what I want to do, and if anyone wants to join, fantastic.
Better than sitting at home twiddling my thumbs wishing I was doing something fun.
I do this in my running club (granted, it’s quite specific). Hello I’ll run X time at Y place for that long / that purpose. I don’t even explicitly « invite ». Then a few people sometimes join. We are a few hundreds so I meet new people each time. It’s nice and bears 0 organizational cost for me
Ah, Foursquare was so much fun. Definitely inspired this, except this is a little more private -- only your explicitly-added friends get to see your hollers.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what a "public" feed might look like and ultimately decided that my goal wasn't to make a social media app, but to specifically hang out with my friends in person. There's also a locality angle to this, where if you live in LA, you won't add a friend in Montana to your group, because they could never attend your events. So it becomes hyper-local by default.
Group chats, I think, are a fantastic medium for directed messaging (you have to explicitly choose the friends that you're group texting), and if that's something you like, then there's no reason to use Holler. This app, on the other hand, is about undirected messaging, where you simply broadcast your activity. The friction of choosing the group text and possibly excluding someone or accidentally including someone you didn't mean to goes away.
It does introduce other problems, to be fair, but I think it's a trade-off that I'm happy to make.
Thank you for trying! Sadly for ease of use but excellently for privacy reasons, Apple isn't very nice about giving names. It's just something we have to work around.
Privacy is definitely a goal. I'll update privacy policy for sure.
Part of the deal is that only the people you've added explicitly as friends can see your hollers. There's no "public feed."
One of the things that really jumped out at me is that several of my friends are Latino, and I was building this back when the ICE in Minneapolis thing was really big. I don't want to create world where people can track them and say "I know this group of non-white folks will be at this location, therefore we'll park our ICE truck outside and wait." So there was a lot of thought that went into how to make it safe for them.
Among other things, the data in the system only sticks around for a few days after the event. Also, while there is RSVP functionality, it's not required -- you can just show up. There are a few other things I've added that I can't remember off the top of my head that focus on the privacy angle.
E2EE felt like overkill at the time, but I can certainly work on adding it. Thank you.
Thanks for calling out the broken links (I don't use Twitter, and the email just needs to be wired up), and for the call out on privacy. Will get that updated soon.
Thanks! I have an alpha version of Holler on Android native with two of my friends that have Android phones. We're still in testing phases, but I'm hoping to have it published in the next couple of months. Stay tuned. :)
This is nice, what features do you have in your mind beyond this ? Do you plan to add randomisation where you can meet whoever is available in that region(let's say supermarket) beside your normal friends ?
Randomisation is one I've thought of before, but ultimately rejected because it's a thing I've played with in the past and never liked. I dunno if you remember an app called Urbanspoon from back in the day. It was basically a randomized Yelp. More often than not, I didn't want to do the randomised activity, so I'd just spin it again and again and then get frustrated and go to my normal places. But maybe that's just me.
I do have a couple of other ideas, though.
One idea is to re-holler. If I say I'm going to this brewpub and that hollers out to my friends, then one of my friends could say "Yeah, I'm going here, and I'll invite my friends, too." But then you start getting into some weird network effects that might be problematic.
Another is the idea of personas or profiles. There are events where the acceptability of your friend group changes. If I'm going to a farmer's market, it's totally appropriate to have a coworker join you, but at a BBQ at my house, I'd rather not have my coworkers join. Similarly, my family can join a BBQ but I'd rather not meet them at a professional conference.
Similarly, there are some events where I think it's OK to bring a plus-one and in other circumstances absolutely not.
Another concept is that sometimes I might go to, say, ComicCon with some friends in a faraway city. Now my definition of "local" has changed, so if I holler while I'm in San Diego, my friends back home in Boulder won't be able to attend anything -- but my friends that are with me at the convention might totally want to know what's up. So having some sort of mechanism for saying "I'm not at home base, I'm somewhere else and the rules are different" might become useful.
So far I've rejected all of those for one simple reason: they increase friction. I want this to be as simple as it can possibly be to hang out with my friends. The more friction you add, the less likely people are to keep using it. At least, that's my philosophy. So I've rejected just about every other feature I can think of.
I agree, if not planned properly, it can increase friction and make it complicated. However, your idea of personas is good, you can use it and also add certain toggles as per where you are going to show your profile to only those who you want to.
For example, for farmer's market, your profile will be visible to only coworkers at that time and when during bbq at your house, your family members can see it. It's a one time setting, I think it's cool.You don't need to built it instantly, you can go in phases.
I think Insta has rolled location thing, but here I'm talking about location + personas, I hope you understand my point and I'm not making it complicated ?
Totally. But now we're getting into location tracking, and for various reasons (privacy being one of them), I'm mildly averse to tracking location.
And as you approach the "coworkers vs family" problem, you start to drift toward individual invitations, which again adds friction and decision making.
What I think I've settled on is the least friction for the most value. It's not perfect, and I'm not chasing an endless roadmap of features for the sake of features. I've hit upon what really works for me and my social group, so I'm trying to be really, really thoughtful about any additional features.
I do have a draft of personas on my beta app, but I'm not totally happy with it, so I'm going to continue tweaking it and testing it with my social group before releasing it.
This sounds great! The main barrier I see is getting everyone I want to install the app. Perhaps a "mass-SMS" variant could work, so it's independent of whatever messaging apps everyone runs.
Like the idea and the website looks good! Did you design by hand or what was your workflow for coming up with a design language, color palette, the sliding banner with headlines, etc?
Thanks! I came up with the color palette and the overall design. To be totally honest, I had AI do the HTML/CSS, as frontend is not my specialty, but I drew up the main design in Canva first and spent a lot of time with Claude to get it to reproduce what I wanted. It came up with a few things that I liked, and it came up with a few things that I hated. The final product out of Claude was probably 95% of what you see here, and then I went in and tweaked the rest of it by hand.
As someone else pointed out, there's pressure in group chats to reply. This explicitly avoids that.
Also, let's say you want to go to a park for a picnic, and you have 100 friends. Which 100 friends are you going to add to a group chat? That's thinking you have to do, friction to getting the engagement going. You have to start thinking about "if I invite Sue, then I can't invite Dan because he's her ex," and blah blah blah.
Group texts are excellent directed communication media. But this is undirected event management. Rather than me inviting 13 specific people, I'm simply broadcasting the destination and time vector.
It's a different way of doing things. I'm not surprised at your question -- it's often the first one I get. But I'm explicitly attempting to solve a different problem than group texts solve.
Not the person who wrote that reply but their reply immediately clicked for me.
Here in Europe basically everyone uses WhatsApp. So you might as well just place a WhatsApp status update writing something like "We're doing X this afternoon? Wanna join? We'll leave from [location] at [time.]" and basically everybody in your contacts can see that update.
It's not perfect (different privacy model, a lot more people can see the update unless you have a very curated contacts list) but no friction of getting people to install another app.
Edit: Also no notification for status update, so slightly different model that could solve the same need.
Ah, yes, that makes sense! I think that's a great solution.
I think perhaps one sort of semantic/slight difference is that Holler is hyper-local. If you live in LA and your friend lives in London, they obviously aren't going to the local farmer's market with you. I'd say the vast majority of my WhatsApp friends aren't local (I'm based in the States.)
BUT I can totally see that being an easy way to do things if your local friend group is on WhatsApp!
One of my questions would be whether anyone (strangers?) can see that or not. And again this is a US-centric concern, but one of the things I think a lot about is ICE and the government tracking non-white people, and so if there's any semblance of a public "I'll be at X place at Y time," then I'd rather not make that public. So Holler solves that.
But yeah, that's a creative use case for WhatsApp I hadn't considered! Very neat. Thank you for explaining.
I do recognize your use case and think it is a better solution than a WhatsApp status update. However (at least in my friend group) the friction of getting people to install yet another app is also very high.
Having said that, once there's an Android version too I'm definitely going to try if I can get a bunch of friends to try it.
As noted elsewhere, the website was made with the assistance of AI. I designed it myself in Canva, used AI to generate the HTML/CSS, but I designed it myself. The app itself is 100% hand-coded by me, though if you consider some of the AI-suggested autocomplete to be AI slop, maybe that's fair.
This app is designed to make the world a marginally better place, so maybe instead of shitting on someone's hard work, providing constructive feedback would be more in the spirit of collaboration and positivity. Have a nice day. :)
I'm an introvert and socially anxious, but I do enjoy hanging out with my friends. I just HATE the invitation-and-coordination game. If someone invites me and I don't want to go, I hate having to come up with a socially acceptable excuse. Inviting someone and waiting for them to make a socially acceptable excuse is equally awful to me.
Then you get to coordination. I want to go to the brewery at 2pm, but your kid has soccer practice so you can't get there til 3:30, but then Joe has to leave at 4 to pick up his mother in law at the airport, and... ugh. It's the worst.
So I made Holler, which is basically you hollering to your friends, "I'm going to be at the farmer's market at 2pm," and then you just go. If they show up, fantastic. If not, whatever, you were going to go anyway.
No coordination, no invitations, no friction. Just holler and go.
It's iOS only for now, but I'm working on an Android app as you read this, so hopefully that's coming soon.