Show HN: Ferris, social network for IRL activities with your closest friends | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ferris, social network for IRL activities with your closest friends

ferris.app

28 pointsearlyriser25 comments

Hi HN!

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

> 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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)

Social/psychological considerations:

I cannot find the study to link but this one is pretty similar https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychology-facts/how-many-f... Basically 8 is the number of really closest friends a person has. Also we have Dunbar's number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

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 think you should put this comment on your website. It instantly lets people understand, and that’s super important.

I read your comment first, then checked out the website, and found the website lacking on motivation / detail / why it exists.

Looks pretty polished already, good job! And sounds interesting. It's a good focus on one thing which is important as differentiator to other social networks. In the past there was Path [1] which allowed only 50 friends, but was more generic. It's also great to go freemium from the start instead of ads or trying to be fully free until you run out of money.

Some questions that I didn't find answered in the FAQ or elsewhere:

- Why does the birth year go into the app settings and not the profile? And 1950 is the default?

- What's the Ferris tag in the app? Like a "secret" identifier? In the settings section maybe this coulb be explained a bit.

- In the app settings notifications are off by default. Is that intended? It's nice as it reduces distraction, but with the interactions on the app being less frequent already (one activity every now and then per friend with just 20 friends) I can imagine notifications being necessary to build traction (not the app itself, but also as a participant, when planning activities, I probably would like my friends to know without them having to actively open the app, especially for spontaneous activities).

- I can only add friends when knowing their Ferris tag. When a friend doesn't use the app yet, I have to explain what it is myself. Maybe you could add an "invite via mail/link" feature, where the friend (not on Ferris yet) sees an explanation what Ferris is, can sign up and then automatically the Ferris friends relationship is established

Good luck with the project!

Hi!

- Birth year. This is not part of the profile because usually your friends know your age. It's a way to internally know which demography is using the app more. It's the only part of the app that is Ferris focuses instead of user focused. I debated if I just simply add a yyyy-mm-dd input and give the user the benefit of remembering their friends birthdays (as plenty of apps), but the day of birth is way more personal than the year, so I scrapped that part. I maybe need to add a tooltip explaining why I'm asking this. 1950 is just a number I don't think 99% of my users will have.

- Ferristag: it's a secret identifier. If you go to Friends > Add Friend, you can see your Ferristag. You copy and send it.

- Notifications: I went with the option of making the explicit choices, but I if you have no notifications activated you will see a reminder, once that you add a friend. It looks premature to ask for notifications permission before this could be useful. But yes, notification handling is maybe something I could make better.

- Email invites: I thought about this, but finally rejected because it loses the personal touch and it looks spammy most of the time, or that my friend is getting a commission lol. I could rethink this based on feedback.

Thanks!

Without a way to email or text a link, 1) as he said above, i am not your sales person and will not likely convince people to start using this app. 2) it requires my friend sign up, and then off-app give me thier deets so I can whitelist them. Seems un-necessarily complicated. Just don't do creepy things with the data and put that in your messaging.

Good luck!

This has been a blind spot for me, thanks for reiterating the feedback. I'll add a pre-filled email on the next iteration.

I think this is really cool. Something that enhances your actual social life instead of acting as a parasitic replacement for it.

Thanks a lot!

This could be good but after signing up it seems like I can't see how it actually works or what it looks like. I have to add friends first. That means I have to sell the idea to my friends before I can even see if it is useful.

How are you going to make money?

The most important screens are https://www.ferris.app/assets/images/screen_home.png and https://www.ferris.app/assets/images/screen_form.png

What do you think it could be a good way to show what it looks like without friends invited? I recognize that simply being the first to install demands a incredible leap of faith.

Being able to use the app with no friends but still send a “weblink” to the event page would be incredibly useful for onboarding.

I recognize that is a lot of work but it would greatly reduce the leap of faith required for the first user and subsequent additions to a friend group.

The sharing of event links would hugely increase natural growth.

Easy growth is the name of the game with any network effect based product.

I really like this idea so I downloaded it and convinced my friend to download it too. But I think it’s broken. I tried adding an activity, but I just get a grey screen that says Activity at the top.

Seems interesting, congrats on the launch! Though it shows as not available for my country. Any reason for this? (I'm in LATAM)

I'm launching on just selected countries because I'm going to test cost/revenue ratio. As soon as it seems to be sustainable I'm going to open to LATAM.

This seems like a really smart idea! I previously handled multiple group chats for this, and now use Snapchat. But seeing everyone's RSVPs (as an attendee, not host) should be really helpful.

Minor bug: The android app doesn't seem to work with password manager autofill.

Thanks for reporting that. On these cases do you use the pwd manager for creating a pwd and stay logged in basically forever, or for creation and frequent logout/login cycles?

> On these cases do you use the pwd manager for creating a pwd and stay logged in basically forever

Only initially, so it's a minor bug, but making the onboarding experience as smooth as possible is going to be important for retention of less interested users I'd imagine.

This looks promising!

If I had 20 friends I would try it /s

One question regarding the "Free plan", is there a pricing page somewhere that I didn't find? What would a "power user" do differently then someone on a free plan?

I probably need to add this to the front page. But it's on the FAQ https://www.ferris.app/en/faq/

Free: 8 created activities per month, unlimited received activities, 30 comments per activity.

Premium $9.99 yearly: 30 created activities per month, unlimited received activities, 100 comments per activity.

Excelsior $4.99 monthly: 300 created activities per month, unlimited received activities, 1000 comments per activity.

Love this! It's been a hassle wrangling friends since we all have different schedules and commitments and love the open concept of joining events.

Bueller? Bueller?

I cannot lie: the film was an inspiration. There's even an icon for art activities based on George Seurat's painting https://www.ferris.app/assets/images/cards/painting.png

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