The ‘Social Media’s Dilemma’ you’ve never heard of — and its incomplete solution
Product, Problem & Motivation
Although Meetr became something more — a grand vision, a project I dedicated more time to than my college degree itself, and a journey — it started out as a mere observation, a single question:
If social media actually gave us what we use it for, then we would stop using it, right? It gives us entertainment and information, but the core human motivation for it is really the desire for connection.
If Snapchat streaks could create real friendships then the world would be at peace, and snapchat would lie in a dusty corner while everyone was out enjoying real quality time in real life.
Social Media, by nature, is incentivised away from giving the thing it promises. And when the incentive is $114.9 billion a year in advertising alone for Facebook, well…
But it wasn’t just a problem of incentives — I wondered if it were even possible to create something that can spread and become as ubiquitous as social media without it being addicting. Perhaps being complicit in the trade of money for our happiness was an evolutionary necessity to stay alive as a product in the digital landscape.
How could you create something that people kept coming back to (screen time is, unfortunately, money) while actually fulfilling the desire that led them there in the first place? Could you actually help people create deep meaningful connections and expect them to come back to a glowing rectangle?
My solution was Meetr. Once they’ve established real, deep, meaningful connections, Meetr would simply be the method to handle all the logistics and make it as frictionless and easy as possible to coordinate hangouts in real life. A real digital bridge to our disconnected physical world — a place where people were united through in-person interactions instead of divided by their daily realities.
This could be big, I thought.
Customer Discovery
Even as my heart swelled and my mind got excited over such a vision becoming real, I knew that desire clouds clarity. Couple that with a crippling fear of failure, and I shrunk under the probabilistic failure of any venture — let alone one as large as Meetr was in my head.
Did people really care? Was I projecting my frustrations? What problem was I actually solving?
Nevertheless, once the thought of a solution appeared in my head, it wouldn’t leave. Features were threads that I pulled together, and before the end of my summer internship, I had a very messy tapestry in front of me. A messy one full of potential.
It reminded me of the wonder of being a Computer Science major — the ability to treat something wrong as a problem to solve. The ability to even attempt to change the social fabric of my own life and that of many others for the better.
I took the lessons I learned from my internship: that agency was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was something you could always claim for yourself, by yourself. I was going to make this thing real.
And so the customer discovery began. What started as tidbits I casually threw into conversations with friends bloomed into full interviews with strangers. And the pain was real. Here are the distilled insights from over 40+ interviews :
- The primary problem with meeting up is logistics. Plans don’t match, and the coordination needed for larger groups scales exponentially.
- Group chats suck. The bigger it is, the fewer people feel the need to respond. The smaller it is, the more you have to relay information.
- People always default to the easiest option, which is most often the ever-helpful “I don’t mind”
- Inertia and comfort always prevent the special and exciting to happen. People want memorable experiences but need an excuse to make them real.
- People’s social lives are wildly and drastically diverse
Meetr started as a simple tool to help bridge the logistical nightmare. We wanted to apply ‘crowdsourcing’ for hangouts. Everyone can input a little information, and Meetr would take that chaos and information and turn it into a well-planned and organised event.
But as my knowledge expanded through customer discovery, so did the vision.
The Vision Expands (Maps & Circles)
What if Meetr could be a tool that shapes you back? I mean, social media already does it, right? It wires your brain in ways that bring you back and makes you stay longer and longer (for those of you who don’t keep track of your screen time, look at it for a real shock).
What if it became more than just a tool? What if it facilitated things that were never possible before? What if it actively changed how you socialize to do more and do it better?
“Geography is destiny” is as true in social life as in history. Friends who I saw daily slowly faded to mere acquaintances once I changed dorms. How similar our schedules were determined everything for everyone but my closest friends.
What if Meetr could bridge that gap? What if it could eliminate the undue process and tiredness of actively reaching out to disparate friend groups; Connect you to events that wouldn’t be possible otherwise (a 30-person pickup dodgeball game); Or use financial incentives such as discounts to push you towards unique experiences you would never do otherwise such as karaoke or visiting that local museum? What if it could help make the memorable trips or experiences actually happen?
Execution
Dreaming was all exciting, but perhaps what was most motivating was that people wanted to join the team simply after the debriefing on the project behind the interview.
What started as a small project eventually ballooned into a team of 8 — one of whom was a fledgling developer who I had planned to teach to code in exchange for work, but it eventually blossomed into a partnership and someone who has helped me grow as a mentor & manager, a software engineer, and a person (who definitely wouldn’t roast my mentoring abilities).
We rapidly synthesised all of the user insights and came up with a million and one features that would solve them.
It seemed possible: a one-stop shop for every tool you would need, from figuring out the logistics by finding the best time to do something, to polls & checklists, to seeing all your upcoming hangouts in one organised place, and being able to share the memories easily and efficiently after-the-fact. To help facilitate the spontaneous casual things and to make the big exciting bucket list items happen.
We had the team and the vision behind it — it was all about the execution. The git repo was initialised, backend connected, UI designed, and marketing material created.
Little did we know that just about everything up until this point was wrong. We were driving with our eyes closed, and the map we memorised was wrong on top of that. We were driving Meetr into a wall of *suck*.
It was only with the crash that we realized we held our eyes shut. What did we do so wrong? Well… that’s in Part 2.
