Tl;dr; We built a new social network called Slyde where you categorize connections based on who they are to you: friends, work, family or public. It has anonymous likes / dislikes and profile customization among other things. We launched to friends and family a month ago and just opened publicly. Story is below.

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Around a year ago a few friends and I were talking about how we disliked social media. We came to a quick realization that we kept our accounts for the same reasons we never post on them; our friends, family and co-workers were there and we had no way to express our personality. We couldn’t share some things with friends because of fear of family members or work friends seeing. We could use groups or filters but those were cumbersome so we just opted not to post at all. Turns out we weren’t alone.

I floated the idea to them that maybe we should make our own. It was clear that there was a need for something new. But how could we give people an outlet to display their personality and still maintain that privacy?

It didn’t take long for us to determine that in most cases we all have 4 different personas in our day to day life: Friends, Family, Work / School and how we are in public. This would be the base of Slyde; it was the natural way we already maintained our social lives, we just needed to bring it online. Keep it simple. Give people 4 categories they can put people they know into, and allow them to share with those categories. Google Plus was something we looked at as an example of how giving people too many options can be a bad thing.

We got great feedback across the board on those assumptions, but we still wouldn’t use something new just because we could separate our lives easier. Through all the faults of MySpace there were a couple pieces that always made us feel like we got to know someone better. Music and Style. If we could show people a little more about ourselves instead of just writing an about me, our profile would better represent us. Especially if we could adjust it based on who was looking at it.

Being the only engineer -- I have previously worked as a lead architect and senior engineer at Vacasa and Nike -- it was going to be a large task. The biggest elephant in the room was critical mass. The value of a social network is the network. Our critical mass answer wasn’t exciting, but early results may be showing it to be true: Make something people want to use.

If we made something we would want to use, others might too. Once they’re on they aren’t likely to just delete their account. If the appetite for something new is as big as we thought it was we would see small but steady growth, and on a micro level these pockets of people would reach their own critical mass and begin sharing it at a higher rate. We’re already starting to see this happen.

We knew at the beginning the best way to get to a critical mass was to target a smaller mass. We spent a good amount of time theorizing on how we can adapt our ideas to fit a smaller niche. The more we developed these ideas, the less we found ourselves wanting to use it. We didn’t personally have a need for something new in a smaller niche community. The product that we wanted was a general social network that all our connections could join that gave us our personalities and privacy for self-expression. That idea lost it’s value if it only pandered to a niche audience.

When we released it to friends and family we weren’t expecting much. We figured a few people would sign up, we would get some feedback and then iterate. Instead, we had hundreds of them sign up and share it, and received overwhelmingly positive feedback on the overall concept. This seemed to validate that there is a need out there, and that we might have even executed on that need.

Our biggest tell that we were possibly hitting a sweet spot was how many people signed back in every day. It was initially perplexing. Even with little content during our closed test and an average anywhere from 10 to 40 connections per user, nearly 40% of our users were signing in every day, with most of our users signing in every other day. After opening it up publicly a few days ago we had our answer. We might have built something people want to use. We’ve received the same positive feedback our friends and family gave us, from complete strangers. So far we’ve only had a small reddit post to test the waters. Starting with this HN post we’re ready to start telling the rest of the world about it.

We know that for true data privacy we have to give up ad retargeting and tracking. Privacy vs profit is a real discussion, however we believe we can have a viable business model without giving away data privacy. Less targeted advertising and things like premium channels are things we’ve discussed. Privacy is a core principle and guides us in every decision, however right now it’s about building something people want and worrying about business model if we’re lucky enough to get to worry about it.

We’ve possibly stumbled upon a couple of right answers, but we surely don’t have all of them. We wanted to post on HN for two reasons: to show others what we’ve done and to get feedback on our execution. Please fire away!