Rem 2.0: Social Impact for All
HCS Builder’s Incubation Program Summer 2020 Project Recap
Our Vision for Rem
We’re an impact-centered vertical social network helping college students make more of a social impact in their day-today lives through better activism and more effective charitable giving. Think Strava or LinkedIn but for social impact. It’s a platform that allows people to connect around a common purpose of making a tangible difference on some of society’s most important problems.
Why We Need a Vertical Social Network like Rem.
- A Crisis of Purpose. Feeling like you’re making a difference in society is hard, especially for socially conscious young people in the world who want to see change happen. Existing avenues like volunteering can feel like too much time, charitable giving too expensive, and social media activism not enough to make a difference.
- Existing Networks Aren’t Built for Activism or Making a Difference. As social media activism has become increasingly prevalent during this second wave of the BLM movement, it’s become increasingly clear to us the inadequacies of legacy social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram as they pertain to activism. We began experiencing dissonance on these platforms as we encountered stories and posts discussing heavy social issues followed by glamorized beach photoshoot pictures with sunshine emojis and “life is a movie” captions.
Rem was founded on the vision that every person, whether they’re a billionaire or a college student, can and should be able to make a difference in the world. Done right on a societal level, activism and charitable giving have the power to enact real structural change in the world and that’s what we hope to accomplish with rem.
The Pivot to Rem 2.0: Experiences from Our Initial MVP and User Feedback
At the start of the summer, the app represented an avenue by which the average a college student or young professional could make a daily impact via charitable giving. By our initial beta launch, the rem MVP app was both functional and beautiful. It offered a personalized set of charity recommendations for each user, a database filled with the most cost-effective and impact-driven charities, and a Venmo-style global giving feed. We also had envisioned a host of new features to implement, such as donation leaderboards, challenges with friends, badges for dedicated givers, and heightened metrics for charity research.
However, though functional and beautiful, the app failed to retain users. We raised a respectable initial round of charitable donations, but soon found weekly growth stagnating then plummeting to just a few active users per day with limited overall engagement.
After a week of deliberation and discussion with our beta users, the team decided to adopt a new approach. We realized that for rem 1.0, the ability to “make an impact” was primarily limited to charitable giving. And it’s somewhat unreasonable to expect our users to engage with the platform everyday if donations are the primary purpose of the app.
Thus in mid-July, we made the decision to evolve rem 1.0 into rem 2.0: a social media platform that integrates activism and the concept of interactive impact with charitable giving. A place where people can both talk about things that are meaningful and do things that are meaningful.
With the release of rem 2.0, we’ve seen both our daily user numbers double and average time spent on app increase 30%. As we posted about the changes we hoped to see in the world, ignited discussions on other users’ posts, learned what our friends cared about, and donated after learning about certain causes, we felt more knowledgeable and engaged with the world around us, and with our engagement, we were actually donating to charity in the process! On all fronts, we feel as though we have something special brewing on our hands with rem 2.0.
The bottom line? With the official App Stores release coming up in a little over a week and the app feeling like it’s headed in the right direction, things are looking promising but our work on rem is far from over. In our time at the HCS Builder’s Incubation Program, we have learned so much from our incredible mentor Alex Wendland and all the other incredible speakers / programming hosted by Ryan and Anna. We’re incredibly thankful for the opportunity to have been a part of the inaugural BIP cohort and look forward to making the community proud.
Interested in connecting with us or learning more? Reach out to our email ourteam.rem@gmail.com or follow us on instagram @rem.fyc — see you on the app soon!
Written by Michael Wu, Harvard Class of 2022. Founder and CEO of Rem.
