The Mother of all social networks

Wojciech Omiotek
Sep 4, 2018 · 11 min read

Peanut is a smart mobile solution for mamas to connect and learn from like-minded women. Being a parent is wonderful, but, it’s tough and it can be lonely. With Peanut, it’s easy to connect, arrange playdates, schedule events, discuss and share advice on trending topics.

I joined Peanut in October 2017 as a Lead Designer. Working on a social product was a very new experience for me and this is exactly what sold me on the decision to join the team. As a designer, I am responsible for a digital product design, user experience and branding. We work in a small, but a very busy team. Challenge of building something from scratch at early stage and seeing company grow is what excites me the most.

So far We have built a user base of 300,00 moms who have swiped over 19 million times and sent more than a million messages to each other. I would like to share our brand and product design process with you.


Start with a problem

27% moms feel lonely or isolated. 1/3 of women are affected by Postnatal Depression. 25% moms feel their old colleagues or friends disappear after having a child. It’s much harder to make new friends as an adult. It’s even harder if you’re a new mum when your friends don’t all pivot into motherhood at the same time. Pregnancy is an exciting time as you look forward to life with your new baby, but the thought of leaving your job and work friends can be daunting.

As a mother you can feel isolated. You constantly have to make a conscious and determined effort to get out into the community and attend activities that will help you connect with other people and be a part of a bigger community.

Nowadays, Women need a modern solution to connect with each other. Existing social platforms are too broad and fragmented. Users care about their verticals.

An entire generation of women are growing up mobile first, using mobile products like Facebook, Instagram, Uber, and Snapchat etc. If you’re looking for significant other, there are ton of dating apps at your disposal like Tinder, Hinge or Bumble. But when you hit motherhood, there is no engaging, mobile product to reflect this part of your life. Everything regresses to the use of web forums.

Existing products on the market aimed at mothers felt off. We didn’t recognise the tone of voice or UX of products we used every day. They felt outdated, old-fashioned and in some cases insulting.

Why has tech been slow to innovate better products for mothers?


Idea

Michelle Kennedy is the CEO and a Founder of Peanut. She had worked in high roles in tech start-ups and dating apps, as Director of Bumble and Deputy CEO of Badoo, so she decided to use her experience to help create a solution for modern mums.

After finding herself trawling blogs for baby advices at 2AM while her friends were out in clubs, she decided to create a product to make motherhood a little less lonely. As the first of her friends to become a mum, she didn’t have a network of other mothers to share her experiences with. She wished there was an easy way to find like-minded women to talk to.

“I didn’t really recognise the tone of voice that people were using towards me,” she explains. “It felt like a club that I wasn’t a part of.” This was because although she’d had a baby, “I hadn’t changed — I still felt like me”. She felt isolated and frustrated, she realised she didn’t know anyone else with a baby.

Peanut would create a safe place for mothers where they can truly be themselves and won’t be judged by the looks of perfection-hungry generation. Other Peanut users would have similar life experiences so every mama who feels like she needs to talk to someone, can reach out and share whatever is on her mind. Dating apps only rank users by the looks and motherhood is most of all hard and long work.

As a mama, maybe you don’t feel like sharing anything about your labour experience or eight-months long back pain. There’s also shame and fear to fit a supermodel-mama picture that’s drawn widely across social media. On Peanut, mothers could be totally open about their problems and find words of support and encouragement from fellow users.


Mission

We’re on a mission to build a community of women, who happen to be mamas. Our vision is to become synonymous with modern motherhood. We want to empower and give women a network. It’s not about being a mommy, it’s about being yourself, and as part of that being a mother. Women didn’t stop to be who they are just because they had a baby.


Solution

Connect with mamas like you, near you. We show you women in your neighbourhood with similar-aged children and create matches based on shared interests. You can chat, arrange meet ups and share experiences across meaningful topics.

Chat and create group conversations. Women can easily poll meet up times and create events in chat. These events are seamlessly added to their calendar.

Share experiences across meaningful topics. Women can post questions under topics such as ‘Love + Sex’ and ‘Work + Money’ to discuss experiences in the ever-changing sphere of motherhood.


Brand

The name was an easy one, Peanut is a commonly used term in United States (where majority of our users live) which stands for a pregnancy state.

We didn’t want for Peanut to feel like an app for kids. We wanted to represent a blend of aspirational and functional design. Don’t forget that we create a product for women not for babies. We were confident to go with a more grown up approach with a friendly and happy flair. Making the app looking too fashionable and elegant could put some women off, too. It could come across as ‘expensive’ and ‘exclusive’. We went for a middle-way solution, but don’t take it for a final direction. We still learn about our brand and refine it on a daily basis.

We started with a research on brand mood and positioning. We wanted to define who we are and where we want to be in 5 years from now, as a brand. I prepared a branding session for all members of the team where we went through series of brainstorm exercises that later helped us to shape the vision for Peanut. Tone of voice, emotions, positioning, moodboards were really fun and allowed everyone to have an input.

One of the exercises was identifying our brand with a type of a car. Does our brand should feel like driving a Mercedes (too high-end) or a Minivan (too mainstream)? We landed on a Mini Cooper brand model approach:

  • Fun
  • Cheeky
  • Exciting
  • Stylish
  • Customizable
  • Minimal

We quickly established that we want to focus on women relations. We positioned Peanut to be bold, cheeky and aspirational. After brand positioning and interviews we started to shape our vision. We spent a few weeks working on different streams of the brand. It was particularly fun time to experiment and explore different visual styles, we kept asking ourselves “how we can take this even further?”. We had some crazy ideas, some good ones, some bad ones — and that’s okay. It’s what this stage was really about. To define how we look and speak, as a brand. We narrowed ourselves to three main streams and after few discussions we picked and refined on our final direction.

Symbol would most often be presented in small sizes, in the app icon on your home screen or in the header bar in the app. I knew that simplicity will be the most important factor. I wanted to convey the concept of joining as if connection between two users would be made. I started to play around with different shapes and after dozens revisions and hundreds of printed pages up on the wall, we landed on the final version of our symbol. We stress-tested the symbol in various scenarios. Symbol works great both as an app icon and printed on a huge poster. It is also used in the app, on a connection screen when two moms get a match. The logo was born.

For a logotype we went ahead with a geometrical and fresh Fugue by extremely talented type designer Radim Pesko. It expresses a combination of elegance and simplicity, which is similar to Futura but with more bespoke approach. Centred symbol looked good optically when positioned over the negative space between first and last letters. Geometric construction ties in to smooth, rounded shapes of the symbol.

For a brand typeface we picked Graphik as it works great for bold headlines and is also legible as a body copy in the app. We worship pink as our brand colour. The palette is based on warm reds and creamy pinks. We contrast the palette with use of deep black, which adds slick and elegant look.

Picture is worth a thousand words. We worked with a fashion photographer Bella and stylist Clare Nicolson to produce some great range of promotional photography to give more depth to our brand.

Tone of voice was particularly important to nail down as it would communicate with our users and would need to immediately gain their trust. We try to sound honest, casual, fun, supportive and non-judgmental at all time.


Product

Creating a great product is a marathon, not a sprint. You can’t have it all from the beginning. Because we were creating a product for modern motherhood, mobile-first was a clear start. We listed the must-to-have, nice-to-have and not-essential features. With a minimum viable approach in mind we decided to go ahead with most fundamental features of the app first.

Discovery, where mothers can find each other. Messaging to allow them communicate with each other. Events to allow them setup a time and place if they wish to meet.

We spent good amount of time sketching and discussing user flows and wireframes. User experience is absolutely fundamental. We were looking closely at Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook — social apps with high engagement and great balance between functional and beautiful design. We tested wireframes and as soon as we were happy, we started to build. In a startup world, you have to move extremely fast.

We’ve split the user journey into four main routes:

  • Connecting
  • Strengthening ties
  • Getting answers
  • Helping others

We build a product for modern women who feel alienated in the new role of being a parent. Our target users are familiar with technology and mobile apps like Instagram, Uber, Spotify or dating products like Tinder or Bumble. If there is an app to specifically meet your other half, why there is no similar app for when you are after the dating era and just looking for a buddy at the same stage of life? We wanted our product to feel familiar to these women and still bring a joy of playing the game.

Never put visual design over functionality. We decided to use a very clean design language in the app. After many sketching sessions and wireframes we decided that card-based swipe game is the direction to go with. Not only it would feel familiar to urban women, but it would also mean you need to play the game to win. If we would just serve all the profiles in the library style interface, majority of users would be lurkers and wouldn’t be encouraged to make the first step and reach out.

We’ve been called a “Tinder for Moms”. It is because Peanut connects mothers by letting them swipe each other’s profiles. Rules are very similar to what you see in dating apps. Users can swipe up to “wave” at a mama or swipe down to “skip”. If other mama waves back, it’s a match! It is about that “Oh!” moment when user gets a match and it’s what we value most in our hierarchy of experiences.

Users can select a series of categories matching their interests and lifestyle, such as “city gal” “Mama of Multiples” and “Single Mama”. Once the profile is created, the app uses the user’s location and provided information to show them nearby women with similar interests. Users can change their neighbourhood info to find matches in other areas. Mamas can also built out their profiles to include more detailed information whenever they want. When connect, user can chat and create group conversation. Custom scheduling mechanism allows mums to poll and set up playdates without leaving the app (along with many functionality improvements we will release new features very soon). We knew that machine learning and smart algorithms will be very important for high rate users success rate and instant gratification. We prioritise mamas based on their interests, children age, neighbourhood and many other commonalities. The most difficult part about the app is actually get users to break ice with each other. It’s our core interaction and something we are continuously exploring and improving on. We encourage connection at every step of the interaction. We want mamas to play the game.

One problem Facebook Group users frequently run into are privacy concerns. This is especially concerning for people seeking support about sensitive parenting issues. To reassure members we only allow social login at this time. That’s because we can confirm the identity and gender of person who tries to create an account (we’re looking into new verification ways that don’t require signing in with a social account). We’re dealing with very sensitive information. It’s about mums and their children so we take privacy and security very seriously.

After we released first set of features we started to question the full user journey. We have quickly learned that many women believe in our mission and support us. We were lucky to receive tones of feedback on a daily basis. They were both positive and negative. We instantly knew where to improve usability issues and what features to consider to include in the roadmap.

We needed to keep users coming back to the app more regularly and wanted them to see something new every time they open Peanut. After mama would make few local friends, there was not much else for her to do in the app. This is why we recently launched a new community feature called Pages — a better alternative to Facebook Groups, Quora and other social platforms. It allows moms to ask questions, share their knowledge, and come together to help each other out all on one forum. Similar to the way you can start polls to decide on the best times for meetups, you can also start different polls in Pages and let others vote on the answer. That way, you can expand on the poll by starting conversations in the comments to hear a variety of answers.

For those who feel shy or embarrassed by their question, there is the option to post anonymously. Users can take comfort in knowing the posters and commenters are moderated as well, regardless of if they are posting incognito.

To make the experience more personal, we use a smart algorithm to prioritise topics that are the most relevant to your life and your community. Users will also be able to see trending content based on location, in order to encourage moms to meet up and discuss the topics both on the app and off. The more you use the app, the more curated your content will be to your interests. We also added a brand new notification screen, which shows new connections made through the app and when someone “likes” or comments on their post in Pages. Additionally, users who are most active on Pages will be rewarded for sharing their experiences with special badges.


The Future

Peanut currently boasts more than 300,000 female members, generating 17 million swipes. We have been noticed by Apple and featured numerous times on the App Store and called a “Mother of all social networks”. We have been recommended as an App of The Day. We even made it to the Best Apps of 2017 list and got our very own article in The New York Times. It was a crazy year.

All of this wouldn’t be possible without our small, but extremely talented team and obviously not without our users.

Dear mothers, thank you for being there for all of us, you rock today and always. We’re on the long journey to making every motherhood more happy and little bit less lonely. There’s so much more we want to do. All of what you read above is just an introduction to bigger things ahead. We’re just getting started.

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Know any mamas who look for mom friends? Point them this way ⬇︎⬇︎⬇︎

iOS 🍎 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/peanut-mums-meet/id1178656034?mt=8

Android 🤖 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teampeanut.peanut&_branch_match_id=309424857176508851

Wojciech Omiotek

Written by

Always learning • Brand & Digital Product Designer @peanut_app • formerly @deliveroo @duedil

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