@bentossell here are some more details from their blog: https://blog.getbun.ch/announcin...

@steve_wein thanks! I want the founders to jump in and tell us here :)

@bentossell @steve_wein We're here, we're here :D I'm hoping for @jeffrey_wong to jump in any minute, as he's been a real pioneer of this project on our team. Thanks for your comments and questions :) I can tell you some of the problem set I identify with especially - a need to communicate easily and quickly with people I care about (and let's be real, I simply just don't 'care' about everyone like I do my couple BFFs, parents, brother). It's not just about communicating, it's about feeling close by seeing each other's face and hearing each other's voices. But the major thing - I want to do it on my time! Lots of my Bunch friends live in the UK so time difference is a big barrier for me with other face-to-face apps.

@bentossell hah! Heya, I'm one of the co-founders and designers of Bunch. I'll jump in here real quick. :) First off I wanted to thank our team (Joe, Rudy, Julia, Justin, and Hooman), our beta testers, as well Expa for making this happen. I also wanted to thank the makers of Facetime, Tribe, Snapchat, Tap-a-talk, and Myspace for being our inspiration. I’m a huge fan of their products and I want to make sure I gave them a little hat tip. :) I moved to SF a year ago and I’ve been using several video messaging apps to communicate with my girlfriend, family and friends. I love Facetime because of its simplicity, but I wanted something where you can chat on your own time. I love Tribe because of how fast and experimental it is, but replying is kind of hard in their interface when you have notifications. And Snapchat is the king at messaging, but you lose context when you're having a conversation back and forth from snaps. When we built Bunch, we wanted to focus on solving those problems—and selfishly, some of us really needed a better app to communicate with our close ones. As for the “Top 8”, we were definitely inspired by Myspace—there could probably be a really clever growth hack here... but honestly, we were curious about building an app that did less and focused on communicating with a small handful of people. I feel that we’re bombarded with apps that want to make everything social, and we wanted to turn things on its side and explore making asynchronous video messaging more seamless, personal and fun. Again, thank you for sharing this on Product Hunt! The app was built as an MVP, and we’re hoping that we can gain as many insights as possible.

@steve_wein Thanks Steve!

@ericfriedman Thanks for hunting Bunch, Eric!! Much love! Bunch is a really quick, easy, and personal way to connect to the closest people in your life. It's 8 people, sort of the same concept as your speed dial list. Tap and hold to record, release to send. :) I’m loving the experience with my family overseas, and my mum is loving the simplicity of it. Bunch is something we built in just a little over 3 weeks and are really passionate about. Overall I’ve been really humbled by the process and our team’s drive on this and really proud of what we’ve put out there. Thanks again, and we welcome any questions or feedback. Product Hunt is an awesome community.

@mslagh That's a really cool idea. I like it a lot. Something we're struggling with is people who 'fill up their bunch' hastily to play around with it, see the features etc. and then are left with people they don't actually want to communicate with in their top 8. Thanks!!!

@mslagh I had the same exact feedback playing with the early versions of the app. Very interesting things can happen with this product. Love the #hustle the team has as well!

@juanggz heya, yeh evolution is all part of the process. We actually started talking about Bunch (conceptually) several months ago. The original concept was a 1 to 1 messenger—an app where you could only talk to another person. When we shared the initial concept to our team and some friends, we got feedback that messaging only one person may not be enough. There were several use cases where it would be completely impractical to only message one person. An example would be my girlfriend—she has two sisters that she talks to all the time, and it would be challenging for her to use an app with so many limitations. We picked 8 because we found that we only facetimed and video messaged a small handful of people... and also the number 8, conveniently works with a grid. Some of our beta users have already expressed that they want more. Hopefully we can extract and apply the best insights on the go forward. And yes, Tribe was one of my biggest inspirations (along with Snapchat and Facetime). I love their design; however, we all probably should give a little hat tip to Pasquale (designer of Keezy) for sparking this grid style interface. Tribe's messaging experience is awesome, but after using it for a while, there was a lot left to be desired. There are a couple of differences that we innovated on: a) When you get a message on Tribe, you can't send a message back to your friend unless you watch the message first. Bunch enables you to press and hold above the notification bubble to send a message. b) There's no way to reply on Tribe... so you have to watch every message before you can send something. Bunch enables you to reply when you're watching a message by pressing and holding anywhere. When you send a message, it includes a small preview of the previous message to help give some context if you're having a conversation. I hope that everyone gets to experience this part of the app—it's what I love the most. c) When you get a message on Tribe, the position of a user moves around. This was challenging because the person I messaged the most always appeared in the top right hand corner (furthest away from my thumb). Bunch enables you to customize your grid, so you can tweak how you use the app. The foundation of press-hold-release borrows heavily from Tribe, but we're already finding that messaging can be even faster. For example, if you send 10 messages back to back, the 3 second countdown adds another 30 seconds to your messaging experience. We're already playing around with faster ways to message. Bunch will certainly evolve, and hopefully this will be a springboard from which we can learn from.

@jeffrey_wong That's a great explaination you gave me there and I agree on every topics you talked about! You can definitely count me as one of your fellow user during the following days! I wish you the best and I'm really interested to see where you're going next with Bunch! :)

@juanggz Thanks for the support buddy—our team really appreciates it.

@cbkirk Hahaha thanks Chris for your support!! I have a friend who said the same thing... I was the only person in his Bunch and he STILL considered demoting me!

@mazameli thanks for your support! We designed the app with simplicity in mind, so I'm glad that you find it easy and fun to use.

@evannite we're still playing in the space with a handful of projects like Flare and Bunch. There's a lot to explore and experiment with, and instead of jamming features into Flare we thought we'd be better off trying some standalone stuff. It's a conscious effort to be more experimental as a team, within the photo/video sharing space that we've learned a lot about. Thanks for the great question!

@kmkroski exactly! We hope that you will chat with your own Brady Bunch on Bunch ;)

@thorpus Thanks for all your support Justin. :)