But then you have to convince people you donāt even necessarily know to install an app they donāt know, no doubt make an account etc etcā¦ or they could just stick with WhatsApp and just ignore stuff of no relevance. I think we have to remember that most people are not like members of this forum.
Maybe the example I had isnāt the most suited, but Iām sure there are more that would have a better time encouraging sign ups. I see why a broad open invite group would be hard.
But lets say you run a amatuer football league, or your local branch of your political party, or your local AmDram group, etc etc. Or maybe you run a small business and need to communicate quick messages to your staff - basically any group that there is āflowā in which one becomes engaged, and has some form of organised structure in which information needs to flow.
Running out of examples, but I could totally see a space where it fits if itās made and advertised well. The āignore stuff of no relevanceā bit is also tricky, because people lose engagement and interest if the threads are filled with irrelevant stuff.
If you can reduce the hurdles of some of the more flexible tools (like Slack, and to an extent Discord), allow a more community based feel, like Discourse, plus the instant communication and ease of access of WhatsAppā¦ Then sounds good.
I think that is a good example of a use case. I just canāt see it being useful for anything else, the market is so crowded. To use a weird aircraft analogy (because I canāt think of another), you historically have had wide bodies for long haul, and narrow body for short haul. Now we have narrow bodies designed for long haul. The middle of the market (where I think Sphere possibly sits?) is a void because narrow bodies are adapting to bridge the gap.
All that said, Simon has a roadmap, we donāt, and I think we trust his judgement
This is all in and of itself really valid feedback for us. Thank you all so much
To be clear - we are very clear and aware that right now we havenāt cracked Product/Market Fit, and we also donāt yet know what itāll take for us to get there. It might be a killer feature we come up with that nobody else does. It might be a group of features. It might be creating FOMO through PR and early adopters who believe in the prospect of something better being created and who are included in the shaping of a product that we start building out transparently and in the open. It might be all of the above, or something else entirely.
When I started at Monzo this was also largely the case. Itās not an apples-to-apples comparison, but itās also true that āNobody wants to switch banksā was true back then and to some degree still is even with 4 million customers.
What is clear is that there are groups of people using solutions that arenāt meeting their needs. WhatsApp has a big barrier in that everyoneās phone numbers are visible. I know many groups who wonāt use it because of that. The groups that I do know that are using it often up creating multiple chats and them not being segmented together is problematic. Thereās also the distrust of Facebook and the fact that dev work at Whatsapp is pretty opaque, and their core platform is aging (itās a decade old at this point) that could weigh into it.
Slack offers limited tooling unless you pay, and so one big issue there is information getting deleted in large groups.
Thatās totally fair - and again, itās not completely analogous but thatās also true of Monzo, with incumbents copying features
Donāt worry about raining on my parade - I knew the challenges before I joined and itās my job to overcome them, or at least give it my best shot!
Iāll come back with a more detailed response to some of your points on this next week re: Discord etc if thatās OK! But the answer to this specific question is - yes, quite possibly.
We do have early testers who are admins of groups with thousands of people. Weāre synthesising and balancing out the feedback we get from them as well as all the admins we have from smaller groups right now, and it might well be the case that we decide that what we can realistically build is going to be disproportionately helpful for groups of x size and that itās not going to be possible to cater to groups above a certain size. We donāt know that for sure yet, and thatās all part and parcel of figuring out product/market fit
One broader point that is giving us a lot of excitement right now is that we appear to be operating in a new wave of consumer/social, which hasnāt been the case in many years. Covid may well have accelerated the move into new paradigms.
This blog post is really interesting, and something our investors and our CEO Nick are very much aligned with in this regard
Hey Neil, thanks! Very well. We spent the current sprint phase we are in validating a great deal of things - both existent already and a variety and design prototypes and the learnings from them are very illuminating. Theyāll inform the features and the continued testing and refining we do over the next phase.
We are taking things one step at a time, but we are happy with the progress. Feels like gradually putting together the pieces of a puzzle!
Small updateā¦ We recently launched our landing page website. One of the first steps towards coming out of stealth mode!
Check it out:
Aside from that, weāve been focusing on āproduction-readinessā by which we mean squashing an absolute ton of bugs across Android, iOS and Web. Plus, our design team are hard at work mocking up a few design prototypes of upcoming features so we can show them to some of our early cohort users to gather their thoughts and feedback before we build them.
We have a significant amount of groups actually using the product day to day right now considering how early we are (including quite a few forum members here) and Iām in the midst of planning our first digital event!
Couldnāt be happier with how progress is going
Some super interesting ideas here! And the UI from the initial screenshots looks lovely. Excited to see how it plays out especially with Discords re focusing on its copy https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b
Weāre actually super excited about this, it validates a lot of our thinking. And we share the same VC investor
100% there is always room for some competition! Best of luck and excited to try it when you launch
Always good to see competition but from experience messaging apps seem to be very regional.
WhatsApp in much of Europe, South America. iMessage in North America and Canada
Facebook messenger is the preferred in Iceland.
I just wonder how easy it will be to hit that critical mass. I wouldnāt bother downloading any other app based on only 1-2 people I know wanting to use it for a group chat, not when we already use an alternative together already.
Valid point! I am a very heavy Discord user and a reluctant Messenger and WhatsApp user . I only use the Facebook products as everyone I know in europe/the UK does so I have little choice
Hey all!
I know itās been a while since I updated, weāve been cracking on kicking the product into shape
Iām happy to announce that we have landed on the set of requirements that we believe are suitable for a public launch of Sphere early next year, and weāre hard at work on building them! This will include some much needed features such as file sharing, emoji reactions, and more.
In the meantime, weāve just launched Sphere One. This is basically the Sphere Community, on Sphere (we were calling it The Meta-Sphere for a while internally )
For now, itās still invite only, but if youād like to join and check it out, Iām happy to share a handful of invites privately. The app is still early beta and so all feedback is super valuable. Hit me up if youāre interested and I can get a few more folks in.
Hey everyone! Got some big news to share today
So when I joined Sphere back in May, there was very little information about the company that had been publicly shared. I made it my mission to bring about change and for us to get to a place where we had all the foundations in place to start operating a lot more transparently and publicly.
Well, when it rains, it pours, so Iām really pleased to announce the following have all gone live over the last few weeks:
1) Weāve launched our solution/landing page!
This is the brief, beautiful introduction to Sphere. Really proud of the work our design team did on this. It feels like a clear concise addressing of the problem weāve identified and how we are approaching solving it.
2. I wrote a thing!
I wanted to launch our blog with a more narrative version of essentially the same points that are on our solution page, with additional background, context and nuance. So here it is!
3. Twitter and Instagram are live!
You can now follow along with what weāre doing on both Twitter and Instagram - @SphereMessenger is the handle on both.
and finallyā¦
- Weāve launched our Community Forum!
Early days, but Iād love to see you all over there if youāre interested in what weāre doing.
Our dev team have been working super hard over the last few months, and amongst much more, weāve recently launched in our product:
- GIF support
- DM support
- Link Previews
- File Sharing
- Emoji Reactions
- Sending and viewing videos in-line in chats.
Most of this falls under what we consider to be table-stakes stuff for a messenger app. But our devās are also working hard on some pretty major stuff, including a fully fleshed out Events feature, making it easy for any group to create and organise events, gather RSVPās, host contained discussion of any given event, and send reminders and updates to attendees. Imagine something as powerful as EventBrite or Meetup, but as simple as WhatsApp, meaning groups can organise events in seconds, and thatāll give you an idea of what weāre going for. Weāll be sharing some sneak peeks of this on our forum soon.
Weāre really proud of what weāve done in 2020, and we feel that weāve set the stage for an amazing 2021 where we deliver the future of community-driven group chat.
Wishing you all a happy holidays, and hoping weāll see you over on our forum!
Love to you all
Your former admin, SimonB
I do really like the design of it and some of the features, I think itās very well put together and well designed app.
But youāre going to have such difficulty because I have all the various apps and so does everyone else. I was recently invited on a stag do next summer and it was just obvious that the group would be on WhatsApp. Nobody had to ask what app to use, what app people have got, what they like the most etc etc. It was always going to be WhatsApp.
If I landed on Earth today and my fellow aliens and I needed an app to communicate, this would be high up the list, but sadly that isnāt much of a use case. (Not yet anyway)
I donāt see anything other than a pretty skin for WhatsApp. There is no USP here (yet)? The blog post talks about civil unrest and extreme politics and so on - but surely that depends on your user base, it is not a fundamental problem with existing apps. PEOPLE are the problem - always have been and always will be. We are a disgusting species - no app will change that sadly. Or are you telling me you will ban spheres that donāt fit the companies values (hello censorship!)?
I just donāt get it personally Iāve got vibrant communites on WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram and Snapchat.
Is this just not a case of an oversaturated market with another app with no unique selling point. Iāll keep following to see how it goes but Iām not convinced.
Totally fair Rob, thanks for the feedback! I just got off a call with our new Head of Product who is starting next month and one of the things weāll be figuring out is whether our USP will be a single, powerful feature that we build or whether itāll be a combination of what the product offers combined with our values. Itās certainly getting to a place where things are starting to become clearer, but thereās also a reason weāre still in closed Beta right now
I disagree that the problem is not with existing apps. I personally believe that the existing big platforms have hurt humanity due to optimising for engagement and at the same time attempting to create a space where there is little product consideration for the way that people treat each other. And without having considered these implications from the beginning, itās tough to retro-actively begin to enforce new behaviours. The issue is not about censorship or free speech - itās about how people treat each other, and we feel thereās much that can be done in that space. Itās a gigantic nut to crack, to be sure, and maybe weāll never crack it, but we plan on giving it our best shot. There are new apps like Telepath that are identifying similar and starting from a similar place, which gives us confidence that others are seeing the same thing weāre seeing.
Thanks for following, Dave! I guess itās my job to convince you If nobody tried to disrupt a market, then nothing would ever change - saturated or otherwise. One might also argue that fintech is a saturated marketā¦ or that there were plenty of ways to communicate before Slack, or before WhatsApp. Ultimately I think thereās unfulfilled potential for unifying people online, and optimising for empty engagement is delivering the opposite of that.
I am really glad that you guys are being honest with your feelings here, though. This isnāt simply a difficult challenge, but itās potentially the biggest challenge there is, in re-shaping human communication online. Iām under absolutely no illusion of how high this mountain is - itās gigantic! But there is a difference to be made, and I joined this company to work my hardest to chip away at it
Despite harsh criticism, Simon, you know I love you. It is nice to see you back with an update