Networking app “Fives” attempts to shine in a crowded field
The internet has given birth to thousands of social networking apps. Fives, a social networking platform that aims to make it easy for users to connect with their social circle for fun events, is one of those jostling for space in the fiercely competitive field.
Why “Fives”? The original idea, as explained by the founder and CEO of the company, Kai Chen, is to create events in a group of five people.
“On Fives, you can select the type of event, where is it, when is it, who you want to invite, how many people to include,” Chen said. “And you can link to your phone contacts and send invitations.” The bigger picture, according to Chen, is to strengthen friendships. “It would be much easier to meet each other more often,” he said. “It’s pretty hard sometimes to line up schedule and find out who’s free. Fives can solve the problem.”
According to Chen’s research, with a large potential user group of 20 million college students and 60 million young professionals in U.S., the five-people hangouts concept has a potentially huge reach.
But that’s a little idealistic so far. With countless competitors in the market, life for a social networking platform startup is tough. Fives faces the challenge of “Down-to-Lunch,” an App which already has millions of users serving similar functions.
Launched two months ago, Fives now only has a few hundred users, with its new version that’s under testing now expected to launch in mid-October. Fives will start from college students, and expand to working professionals. “We will expand campus by campus and city by city, and NYU will be the first school and New York City as the first city,” Chen said. “Once we figure out a model that could be duplicated we will move from New York City, to the east coast, to the west coast, and to China.”
“These similar startups target different users, and in terms of the success of a startup, it is the executive force of the company that matters, rather than the business idea itself,” said Jerry Zheng, Chen’s mentor from China who used to be the COO of China’s NYSE-listed social network platform MoMo.
Fives’ predecessor is a P2P lending platform, but has pivoted into this new social networking app after months of work from the team. “The biggest problem was the legal issue,” said Chen. “In U.S., regulations are much more haphazard than you could ever imagine, and at that time my team and I were all working full-time — we don’t have the time and money to hire a lawyer. We gave up.”
In Chen’s iPhone, there’s a notepad recording all his business ideas throughout the years, spanning from personal customization of classic white shoes to fresh food deliveries.
“If Fives doesn’t work, I have another one on the list to be launched, the one Fives can pivot into,” said Chen. Chen’s backup plan is a dating app that’s similar in some ways as Fives, helping couples to to do fun things as ways to strengthen long-term relationships.
Chen calls himself an inborn “entrepreneur,” taking pleasure in working under pressure. “Chen is strong in risk-taking, oversight, and willpower,” his mentor Zheng said.
When Chen was in junior high school, he wrote a comprehensive proposal of how he could dominate the earth. “Of course it’s naïve and stupid,” said Chen, “But I always had that thing in mind. I want to make a difference.”
Chen’s tortuous and dramatic background shaped who he is and how he acts. Born in an extremely impoverished family in a small village of China’s coastal province Fujian, Chen dropped out of school when he was 6. Under heavy usury loans, Chen’s father smuggled himself into U.S. and brought Chen to the country five years later. While Chen was beginning his education, many of his former classmates had to drop out to do farm work. “I was the lucky one, and I understand how unfair life could be,” said Chen. “I want to eradicate the inequality.”
Unlike many other Ivy League graduates who crowd into the investment banking industry for high income, Chen doesn’t care about winning wealth and fame. “Money itself is not important to me,” he said. “I never dream to be rich myself — I can survive with five dollars a day, I really don’t care. The goal of my life is to go back to China to do charity work, building hundreds of thousands of schools in the rural area of China. I mean it.”
To Chen, “Fives is a start, and it might be or might not be the destination. It doesn’t matter that much. But now, I just want to do my best and make it happen.”
