My name is Roberto and I’m the founder of Ferris, a social network that lets you plan and join real life activities with your 20 closest friends.
The idea is to give you more friend-time with an app that makes easy to plan activities:
- Spontaneous ones like a coffee on the next break
- Blurry ones like going to the movies someday/somewhere next month
- Repetitive ones like going running during the summer
- Planned ones like a concert this Friday
As an introvert, with a family, and in my 40s I have found it very difficult to have time with my friends.
Existent options have their limitations, which is normal because they are not trying to solve this problem:
- FB events or Google calendar invites feel too formal, there’s not really a way to say “I’m going for an ice cream in 10min, who wants to come?”.
- Messaging apps have a conversational flow and it’s difficult to keep the conversation centered into a topic.
- Email has too much back & forth
Ferris offers an easy way to create activities in seconds and invite your friends, with low pressure to accept. The feed is basically a list of activities where you’re welcome to join. As you can imagine, this list is short and the app is more a tool than a destination with endless scrolling.
Speaking of endless scrolling, I’m also trying to solve some of the problems exposed in The Social Dilemma, so I created something where you’re the client and not the product (freemium model).
I’m very happy to finally ship this. I have been working on it for the last 4 years… in the current form, but my original idea is from 2012. This soft launch is a big step for me. If I’m honest I’m terrified, it’s not my first time launching something, but it’s my first time creating something non-trivial as a side project.
I hope you could give it a try! Inviting your best 3 friends could help you to see the dynamic.
Congrats on your launch. I've wondered for a long time why there wasn't a socially realistic max number of friends on a social network. Make it about people and not a numbers game. 20 friennds seems very good, how did you arrive at this number, and is it fixed for eternity?
Will definitly try this out
So 8 and 15 sounded like the choices on spot, but I added some padding for new promising friends and "hobby friends" (the folks that are not super closer but where you have lots of activity time).
So the limit is psychological and the padding added was to not block users with analysis paralysis seeing a slot like precious.
UI considerations:
I wanted a snappy way to select your friends, they should enter in a fraction of the screen, not a long scrollable list, not a search input.
Increasing
I hope this is not needed, the closeness is by design. But I understand we are bad at deleting friends. I'll see how it goes.
> I've wondered for a long time why there wasn't a socially realistic max number of friends on a social network. Make it about people and not a numbers game.
It slows down the service’s growth. Most social networks exist to make the creator money, not to improve your life.
Social networks with a small maximum number of connections aren’t a novel idea[1]. When we struggle to recall any, it tells us how successful they’ve been.
That all said, I wish Ferris the best of luck. It would be a losing proposition to try to get my circle on it, but the idea seems to come from a good place and I hope it finds its audience.
My name is Roberto and I’m the founder of Ferris, a social network that lets you plan and join real life activities with your 20 closest friends.
The idea is to give you more friend-time with an app that makes easy to plan activities:
- Spontaneous ones like a coffee on the next break
- Blurry ones like going to the movies someday/somewhere next month
- Repetitive ones like going running during the summer
- Planned ones like a concert this Friday
As an introvert, with a family, and in my 40s I have found it very difficult to have time with my friends.
Existent options have their limitations, which is normal because they are not trying to solve this problem:
- FB events or Google calendar invites feel too formal, there’s not really a way to say “I’m going for an ice cream in 10min, who wants to come?”.
- Messaging apps have a conversational flow and it’s difficult to keep the conversation centered into a topic.
- Email has too much back & forth
Ferris offers an easy way to create activities in seconds and invite your friends, with low pressure to accept. The feed is basically a list of activities where you’re welcome to join. As you can imagine, this list is short and the app is more a tool than a destination with endless scrolling.
Speaking of endless scrolling, I’m also trying to solve some of the problems exposed in The Social Dilemma, so I created something where you’re the client and not the product (freemium model).
I’m very happy to finally ship this. I have been working on it for the last 4 years… in the current form, but my original idea is from 2012. This soft launch is a big step for me. If I’m honest I’m terrified, it’s not my first time launching something, but it’s my first time creating something non-trivial as a side project.
I hope you could give it a try! Inviting your best 3 friends could help you to see the dynamic.