Sisterhood’s Origins
A brief backstory
But first, let me introduce myself

Hi! I’m Mara — co-creator of the Sisterhood app — currently being designed and developed with my partner Nick from our home on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Before that, we ran a successful pregnancy and parenting website in the mySpace days — aka social media’s toddlerhood.
Basically, working on social design for women is my jam.
I’m also the co-creator of two wildlings, an avid daily runner, have a B.A. in bio-psychology, an unapologetic neuroscience grad-school drop-out (when I decided to design our first website) and have extensively studied human sexuality and gender politics.
Sisterhood started out as a dating app
The main chat interface was originally designed as a more honest way to get to know people online. You know, because catfishing is a thing, texting with attractive strangers screws with your brain and profiles are always a wishful whitewash of what we want others to see. Dating online needed the truth!
But it quickly became clear our two-person team didn’t want to a) compete with the hugely insane market of online dating and b) actually deal with the dark dank underbelly of dating.
Dating and making new friends are essentially the same problem
But critically, one is notably easier to navigate — the one that doesn’t involve trying to find your “twue wuv”. We pivoted into a friend’s app and I invited my friends to beta. Over time, the guys dropped out and a core group of female friends emerged as daily users, giving advice, making jokes, sharing secrets and showing up without any make up on in the morning.
It felt like we’d become some sort of secret female society that was safe from the insanity of social media
Then Trump won
Right about the same time, the 2016 elections signaled a dramatic shift in the Western narrative on women. Everything was askew. The president himself was an obvious sexist of the worst sort and was elected nonetheless.
Men’s Rights Activists were emboldened by these shifting tides to such a degree they convened in public, warning that rape was possible for women who’d dare to show up in protest.
The world was upside down and inside out. We’d officially entered the Twilight Zone in America.
Suddenly it all became clear
We’d missed a key truth about our tiny taco-truck beta. Yes, it’s difficult to make real friends online, but when men are involved, invariably — threat is also involved. It’s just a fact. Women don’t relax when strange men are around because of the very real threat males can pose.
The key truth? We’d built trust. In our women-only group, trust was the defining element because we all knew there were no men watching.
We let our hair down, told the whole truth, let our make up smudge and had hilarious double-chin competitions to see who looked most like Jabba the Hut.
Real friendship is based on trust and honesty. And that’s what Sisterhood was built to access and accentuate. We don’t need to be sexy all the time, because that’s just impossible and exhausting.
What we need is the solid trust and honesty amongst women that makes us feel whole and worthy, without the sexual objectification and competition.
What’s happening now
I’m actively collecting a seed group of 1000 founding members — women who want to be involved in defining the culture of Sisterhood while we work on shifting the app’s interface from a friend’s-only chat into a women-only community.
If this sounds like something you want to be part of go to sisterhood.today , sign up and we’ll ping you when we’ve launched!
