Guess who’s featured in US App Store Life Style section main banner#1 as well as the main banners on App Store Home Page in other 13 countries! It’s Worthy, a newly launched social app developed by our local startup InnoPage. A huge congratulations to them!
In case you didn’t visit App Store this week – Worthy is a social app that gamify the way people make friends. It allows users to set up 3 questions and answers that represent who you are, and if someone wants to add you as a friend, s/he will has to pick the correct answers for your questions.
If they get the answers wrong, the contact will disappear from the pool, unless s/he sets new questions. Thus you can only be approached or get to know those who share the same values or interests with you, in other words, friend those who are worthy of you.
Check out the 5 fresh questions with Keith Li, the founder of InnoPage on this exciting news!
Q: What’s the inspiration for making a new social app?
A: In the early days of Internet, we make real friends online, I mean the “real friendship.” I have online friends I know for 10 or 15 years who become my life long friends. The problem of current social apps, is that most of them encourage users to add more “friends”, these services tries to help people make friends as easy as it can be. Of course there are good and bad for this approach, and we think the bad has outweighed the good for most of them.
We don’t want fake people, ad spammers, or multi-level marketing persons who are trying to sell stuff instead of making friends to add you. Therefore we need a system to filter out the non desirable ones and let only the genuine people to add you.
You may see lots of people randomly add you on Facebook or any other social services. They don’t really care much who you are, what stuff you like, all they care about is age/sex/location and your profile picture. No matter how many filters the system has, or how detail you can have on your profile, people mostly judge others by one single picture.
Q: What is the design philosophy behind Worthy?
A: We believe the filtering system currently used by almost all social apps is not working. We need a radically new approach to change that.
The way we do it is not to help people add friends without efforts, but to enable users to make friends who think alike and share the same values. You have to be very careful when answering the questions when you want to add h/she as a friend, as there is no second chance. We don’t measure our success by the number of friends users have added, we measure our success for the quality of friends users make. It turns out that in our beta test, users find it really fun, and addictive.
Q: What’s your target for Worthy?
A: We target anyone who are looking to make real friends online. People who value a person not by how s/he looks, but who s/he is. People who want to make friends that think alike and share the same values. People who want friends who are worthy of them.
Q: What is your competitive edge as compared to other social apps?
A: Since we are doing it in the opposite way compare to all other social apps available, we are in an unique position. While others measure by quantity, we measure by quality.
I’ve seen social apps that verify a users by checking if the Facebook account has more than 50 friends, this is good approach, but it doesn’t really solve the problem of people just randomly adding friends and not really care who they are adding.
Q: Would you like to share with us some insights on this market?
A: We develop Worthy because we saw some other social apps are not working. It seems that there is no good solution to it, so we try to solve it ourselves. I think connecting with people alike is a basic human need, so the social apps are here to stay. The question is, is the right tool available now for the purpose? We think it is not, and if we can develop something that works, many users will benefit from that.
Worthy is officially launched on 13 Sep 2013. So we have less than one week statistics, but within 6 hours I’ve seen over 100 concurrent users connecting to our server, according to Google Analytical real time data. This is a very respectable number for a service just launched for a short time, in my opinion.
Side Notes:
Last month, Google gave up this most famous perk of “20% time,” in which employees are encouraged to spin off one day a week to work on side projects. People have been speculating that if this innovation policy helps company innovate or is it actually a waste on resources. InnoPage just proved that the passion for innovation works if you keep it up. Worthy is the 2nd app InnoPage developed this year under its internal 20% time -like programme called InnoLab.
The 1st InnoLab app “Carrot!” was also featured on the main banner of App Store on 1 Aug 2013.
“We’ve just proved that if you have a good idea and have real passion for innovation, you can achieve much more than what you would expect. We will continue to build more apps under our InnoLab 20% time program, ” said Keith.
