What’s your favourite ‘opinionated product’?

David Orlic
4 replies
Hi all, For the last year, we’ve been building a radically different networking app that only does one thing: give you five minutes of anyone's time. Can you message people? No. Can you follow them? No. Can you post photos? No. How about videos? No. Any streaming or recording? No. So it’s just… phone calls? Yes. And all calls are... five minutes? Yes. Before we launch, I'm curious to hear what you think of ‘opinionated products’ like this? Do limitations encourage creativity and make something more fun to use? Or should products be designed to offer maximum choice to their users? Also, I'd love to learn about your favourite opinionated product of all time. Is it BeReal? Thursday? Does anyone remember Yo? Or maybe early Twitter, with its 140 characters? Let’s share some classic product ideas to inspire future makers and designers! Follow our launch → https://www.producthunt.com/products/anyone-3

Replies

Krishna Kumar
interesting take. Lunchclub did something similar during pandemic lockdown. - 30 min scheduled video call with pre-matched person. It was quite interesting to begin with, but it could not maintain interest and lost tempo, atleast for me BTW, how do you find the person to match to?
David Orlic
@kkumarkg Indeed, matching is key when committing to a 30-minute video call. What we're seeing in private beta is that the 5-minute phone call makes people much more open to jump on multiple calls with a diverse group of people. Also, many of our early users ask people to call them on the app as a way to manage inbound requests, asks for advice etc. When it comes to matching on Anyone, everyone who joins the platforms shares what they can help out with and what they want to learn more about – that makes it possible to match relevant people directly with each other. Launching tomorrow – looking forward to get your feedback on the app!
Alyne Padilla
Hopin offers a similar speed networking feature for event attendees but w/video. Love it! Personally, I’m not a fan of follower counts. I often wish all social media would experiment by masking the count for a week and analyze how engagement behavior shifts when the perceived “added value” of someone with a larger count is removed. Some algorithms wouldn’t work in that scenario, but just dreaming out loud with the share.
David Orlic
@alynepadilla I've also tried the Hopin round robin feature and found it to work great at remote conferences. Personally, I find video calls with strangers to be very different from phone calls – people are often more relaxed in the latter format. On Anyone, we have speed networking events every day for specific industries and professions, in which the app provides people with conversation topics. The early feedback we've gotten is that it's way to expand one's network and connect with peers. Agree on follower count! I think we're about to see a new generation of social networks that do things differently.