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SoChat — Chat with everyone
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Hi everyone, I'm co-founder and CEO at Sochat. Really proud of our team's hard work to make this release possible. Hope PH enjoys and happy to answer any questions!
EDIT:
I just created a group chat for Product Hunt people! Click this link to join automatically in Sochat: https://soch.at/mkgnTD
EDIT2:
We're featured on the front page of the App Store right now!
@benburns At its core, Sochat tries to integrate the best features from apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, GroupMe, WeChat and others to make a comprehensive messaging experience that's a lot better than anything else out there. We also think a great chat app should be something you can use with anyone you meet, and we've built the product around the concept of making it easy to connect with both old friends and new ones.
By and large, people in the United States still don't really use messaging apps and iMessage/SMS dominate. We want to be the first 10x messaging product for the US market that does enough to make people realize what they've been missing.
A few feature examples would be:
Magic Words that let you send anything from an event invite to a poll to a rock paper scissors challenge
Really built out GIF integration you'll find anywhere
Self destructing messages
People Nearby, which lets you connect or make groups with anybody in the same room or in your area and also lets you find people you've bumped into
Cool product! What has been a unique insight you've discovered so far that you didn't expect? iMessage is winning because it's on every iPhone by default, what's the #1 trigger to get users to look for sochat and download it?
@jmsuth One thing we've learned is that there aren't many silver bullets in messaging. The key is really to offer the best overall experience and tons of reasons for people to prefer you over what they're using now. Also, onboarding is very important. Because you're building something for people to use all day every day, it's easy to forget that tons of the value isn't immediately visible to new users unless you do a really good job of ramping them into the experience and making sure they find people to have good conversations with from day 1.
it's really nice to have a full-featured chat app (especially as a non-facebook-user). i'm especially a fan of the "running late" feature, since when I'm running late I rarely want to take the time to type a full message out!
is end to end encryption on the roadmap for y'all?
@_tessr Thanks! Yes it is. We already do it in some places (all bluetooth messages are end to end encrypted) and we'll be rolling it out more broadly in the future. Security is definitely something we think is very important. For now, all messages are encrypted and then deleted from the server as soon as they're delivered.
@lukensok - I am one of those who only uses iMessage on my phone and occassionally WhatsApp with international friends. One my computer I use Hangouts and have joined a few Slack channels. - I downloaded SoChat on iOS after looking at the landing page & the features. I wasn't sure if I would think anything of it, but, I LOVE IT! Way to go. I have yet to jump on the SnapChat trend and have not leveraged all of the features of Slack and Slack bots. I do not use Facebook at all, let alone for communication. My favorite part are the "magic" words!
@bhuvanthaker None of those apps have been good enough to win over any kind of critical audience in the US (including WhatsApp/Messenger/etc). People still stick to iMessage/SMS here, which is very different from most of the rest of the world. Sochat does a lot of the same things as other messaging apps, but we also offer a lot more ways to message with a lot more kinds of people.
One example:
While on WhatsApp or iMessage, to add a bunch of new people I meet I need to enter all their names and phone numbers into my contacts list one by one. On Sochat I can just see all their profiles pop up if they're in the room with me, or I can search for any of them by name, username, or phone number, and then can add them all or create a group.
@lukensok @bhuvanthaker I respect both of your opinions. In fact, nobody has the answer, you just have to try and test. Let's all remember there was a time where real-time messaging for business was a saturated market and then comes Slack that changed the whole game. I love Slack more than any other products that were there before
@lukensok @bhuvanthaker I don't totally agree. I've been using GroupMe for years and I'm in many groups with over one hundred people that are checking it basically at all times a day. It's also one of the most popular apps amongst millennials and I just don't think I'd switch or be able to get anyone to. Having said that, SoChat definitely has some cool features GroupMe doesn't. Just not enough to get me or everyone I use it with to switch.
@apr214 @lukensok @bhuvanthaker But I think if you zoom out a bit, GroupMe's usage is still pretty confined to early adopters and the larger groups that those early adopters have gotten to sign up. There's still a big messaging app opportunity in the non-consumption arena in the US, which SoChat can go after. The nut to crack, I think, is figuring out a go-to-market strategy that can beat the dilemma in that XKCD comic. US smartphone users have already glanced at chat apps full of features and deemed them "not worth our time". Is adding more/better features what'll make the difference? Or is it in the launch strategy instead? How did Slack/WeChat/etc do it?
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