julianilson

Same thing happened to us, same day. We're now on the hook for $3,500. When Twilio PROFITS from known fraud, they have no incentive to stop it even when it's obvious. (In our case, tens of thousands of premium SMSs to the same number within the span of a few hours). They aren't issuing a refund for us. As an unfunded startup, this is incredibly deflating. We feel robbed, and Twilio should feel ashamed for pocketing a juicy kick-back from the robber for letting them continue their robbery without making a peep.

Wow...this might be standard protocol, then. It should be covered by a journalist.

Zombies are people too, my friend.

lol the twatter. I wish we had more of a following there... This is when you regret not having invested in the socials.

Exactly! Especially when they explicitly tell you that they'll get back to you by the end of the next business day, and then NEVER do.

Please stop. You're just making me jealous now.

In all seriousness, what's driving me nuts is that they say they'll reply "by the end of the next business day", and there's NO response AT ALL.

What the hell are we supposed to do? We've been using the API for over 2 years. It's in the happy path UX. Removing it and creating a new UX for uploading individual photos feels insane just because nobody is there to flip the switch on our account.

It's possible! Hadn't thought of that. What's most frustrating is that they don't even tell us that. If they did, maybe I would integrate it. But without being sure, it could be a massive waste of time.

We had this issue as well. Out tens of thousands of dollars. For a tiny startup, this almost killed us.

Yeah, I miss those days of just popping in without calling. In Mexico, this is still largely the norm, but now that I live in Canada, that's just a no-no. This is why I ended up creating an algorithm to connect the most compatible people together in a city. Would be great if this community connected in meat-space more often. For those curious: https://www.we3app.com/

If you send an email to support@we3app.com, I'll add that choice to your account.

Just added it!

It doesn't, but the problem is that people aren't usually very kind to other people on the internet. So I can see a good chunk of users rollin' the dice and seeing if they match with attractive people, and if they don't, they just move along. This would ruin the experience for the other two people that are left hanging and feeling like shit. I really want to prevent that from happening.

Yeah, I struggled with this. Want to keep the platform free for anyone to use, while also ad-free. Did you see that you can get free tribes forever just by being invited to the tribes that other compatible users start nearby? Or that you can get free tokens by meeting up in person or sharing the app?

Thanks for the feedback! I'm curious, what would you do instead to try and monetize?

Thank you! I really hope it helps to connect you with some awesome people.

At the moment, we're keeping genders separate. I know, it's very 90's. The issue is that we're just two guys and we don't want to police the platform. The reality is that the friendship apps out there are thinly-veiled dating apps, and that's ruined it for everyone else just looking for friends.

I put down some more thoughts on this in this blog post: https://www.we3app.com/why-tribes-same-gender/

We'll be experimenting with mixed genders later this year, but it will have to be in a careful rollout to make sure it's not abused.

Nice! I hope we can connect you with some awesome people nearby.

We're mostly in English-speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Especially cities like Boston, LA, NYC, London...

But we're growing the team now! We're no longer just two guys. So we should be growing much faster in the coming weeks/months.

Thanks for your support

lol. not surprised, though. THat's where the money is. ANd that's why all other "friendship apps" are really thinly-veiled dating apps. SAD!

Thanks! I'm a bit of a n00b at this, so I really appreciate it.

We3 | Full Stack Developer | Early-Stage | Full-time | REMOTE | Low Salary + 3%-4% equity • Product: Mobile app that connect you to the most compatible people around you in group chats or 3, exclusively for the purposes of friendship.

• Why: We're becoming lonelier as a society and it's really hard to make new friends as an adult. We're increasingly mobile and new working patterns are keeping us isolated. The quality of your friendships is the single strongest determinant of your overall happiness. We want to turbo-charge epic-friendship building, and do to friendship what Tinder/Bumble did for dating.

• Differentiators: Private Profiles | Not for Dating | Smart Matching

• Traction: Connected ~30k people so far.

• Funding: Bootstrapped

• Stack: Angular, Ruby on Rails, Ionic framework, PostgreSQL.

• Values: We really care about our mission.

==Team==

Two experienced entrepreneurs.

==Contact==

julian@we3app.com | More info: https://www.we3app.com/

– Julian, Founder & CEO

Yeah, totally get what you're saying, but unfortunately people's behavior and perception of the product is different when something is on mobile, especially with an online matching service. Tinder was able to break down the stigma of online dating because they were on mobile only. I'm hoping We3 will be able to break that stigma for friendship matching.

Not really. We do completely different things, so I think we're in the clear. The USPTO gave us the trademark protection, too. :)

Yeah. Going to be replacing that soon. Thought it would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone: have an explainer video that was also worthy of press coverage. And it kinda worked, but it made some important people distance themselves because of the politics. Thanks for the note.

Yeah, it was a tough call tbh. The thing is that most other apps slide into dating territory because that's where the money is. And it ends up ruining the experience for everyone who's not there to find a mate. Wrote up a longer post on the reasoning here [1]. It's definitely in the roadmap, we're just two guys working on this, so it'll take a bit of time to manage that transition carefully.

[1] https://www.we3app.com/why-tribes-same-gender/

Fellow expat here. This problem had been on my mind for years. Like you said, the main challenge is how to spot the most compatible people in a sea of strangers that are in a similar phase in life. I built We3 to try to make this easier (and it looks like it's working!). We launched recently and matched around 30k people already.

It's a mobile app where profiles are private. And it connects people in groups of 3, but not only based on interests, but personality, lifestyle, values, etc. It would be awesome if we could connect a bunch of this crowd IRL. What do you think? https://we3.app.link/

Explainer video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpcTF1jZ-1I