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Jean de La Rochebrochard
I've been following the team since january 2013 out of a random connection after having noticed the release of their first product on twitter. The release of Zenly last year came to me as a revelation of how powerful it could become. I have about 110 friends in my network and can't wait to see more social features to come out, the interactions from knowing where you are in real time are endless and so powerful ! :) Keep pushing guys, it's an honor to be part of your journey !
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It's an even bigger honor to have you as such a strong believer & backer @2lr !
Our next step is to get you to 20+ openings a day:
I love the product, I've been using it for a while and am impressed by the evolution of it.
Indeed, the UX is very very well done and you can tell the product team is gearing up on the "fun" part of the experience, making it very accessible and cool to use.
High-five to the FRENCHIES :D
Thanks @gabriel__lewis for hunting us! We are super happy to be on PH today!
Hi guys!
Co-founders of Zenly here, hoping to catch some quality feedback on what we are doing. We’ve been on a mission to popularize constant location sharing for the past 5 years.
Zenly is now the closest thing to a social network built on a map, with your friends and family.
We were hardcore users of Foursquare and Gowalla but felt there was too much friction in the asynchronous check-in. We launched our first app 3 years ago that was focused on families & teen security. It did well in terms of downloads, and very bad in terms of retention. People were deleting the app because it was killing their batteries…
So we spent more than 2 years cracking low-power, realtime anytime, and precise location sharing. We released in stealth what was our internal prototype a year ago only hoping to catch 200-300 users who would validate our algorithms IRL. We’ve been growing by 8% per week organically since and are launching officially today.
On average people receive 6-8 phone calls & texts about their location per day:
“I’m leaving” “I’ll be here in 10 mins” “Where are you?” “On my way”.
Zenly is the best way to get an answer immediately, sharing your location continuously or temporarily, in the app, or through a URL.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the globe are using Zenly every week.
Teens use it with large groups of friends to stay connected, never miss out, meet-up, find each other outdoors (festivals, beaches, etc).
Families, roommates and couples use it to coordinate, and for safety reasons.
NGOs use it to keep track of their dispatched team members, often in remote areas around the world.
There is even a bus system in Chile using it to communicate bus positions to their customers.
We discover new use cases every day… you can even share your location with a link temporarily anywhere on the web...
Our users engage in conversations based on what they see in Zenly, and the next step is allowing them to happen in-app. The very first proof of concept is our emojis which one could see as Yo with context. 2 taps and 1 emoji to share a message that’s often more explicit that 200 characters.
Looking forward hearing from you all!
Ask us anything!
EDIT: @romaindillet was nice enough to share some thoughts about his experience with Zenly on @techcrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/19...
@an21m
"On average people receive 6-8 phone calls & texts about their location per day"
Source?
I like the sound of how you grew until launch. It feels you were able to slowly capture value through UX iteration rather than feature-wise since it seems there aren't many features.
Was this a pivot? are you bootstrapped? any investments?
Now for the obvious question: How do you plan to monetize? since this is peer to peer, unlike 4sq, I tend to believe it has less monetary value. IAP for vanity stuff? Ads? Premium features?
Edit: OK, read the TC article, 10m euros is quite a lot, and very impressive investors. I guess your metrics speak for themselves. I'm interested to know how did you fund building the product before the investment? Seed? Bootstrapped? It's rather rare to see startups waiting to nail the product before getting a substantial funding round. Kudos.
@an21m @gabriel__lewis @romaindillet @techcrunch Quite impressed by the playful UX and the low battery consumption, it's rock solid!
Q: How do you guys see competition with Facebook Messenger? Their strength: they own the network (all my friends are using it, it's easy to share my location with them).
I guess it's the end of "I'll be there in 5 minutes!" and "I'm already on my way" when I'm still stuck in the couch..
Btw, French power! 🇫🇷🍷
Thanks @danr_4 !
Bootstrapped, Launch, Seed, Pivot. Bootstrap again. We ate pasta for years :)
All our cash was going into engineering, buying test devices, and design.
We have a few plans to monetize but it's too early to focus on them yet.
All our efforts go into growth & product, shooting for 1M DAUs as fast as we can.
Great question @hfauq !
A few years ago Google couldn't push the privacy questions around your online identity & photo sharing because they had a brand asset to protect.
Facebook took the social space.
We think it will be a pure player, cross-os, and entirely focused on the subject that will take the location sharing vertical.
Just like Instagram & Snapchat took photo sharing on mobile, or WeChat & Whatsapp were winning chat before Messenger.
@an21m Focus always wins! I'm confident you'll nail this. People look really engaged with the app! Cheers!
On top of having cracked the code of seamless location sharing technology, you guys are bringing new UX patterns on the table. You did better what A LOT of teams already tried to achieve. The best is ahead of you guys! Congrats 🏅
I've been using Zenly for a while, and love it. It's been trending among the "New Apps We Love" in the AppStore for the last couple of days in the UK btw.
Thanks @tomasruta ! So awesome to hear that you love it. Any thing in mind that we should add / improve?
Apple has been very nice with us over the last few days, we are featured in 110 countries!
Top Hunter
Acquired by Snapchat for between $250-350M: http://techcrunch.com/2017/06/21...
I've been using Zenly since the early days.
Impressed by the execution of the team who achieve to built this awesome tech behind the front.
Well done @an21m, @alexisbonillo and all the team!
Thanks @cyrilpaglino !
You know that it means a lot considering how in love with @heytribe we are ourselves :) @alexisbonillo
@an21m This is so awesome! I'm in Paris til Monday would love to come visit you guys. Bien joue les mecs 👌
Let's make it happen!
PM me on Twitter and we'll find time for a coffee @bouazizalex ;)
Super cool! My company had a similar situation where we wanted to build a social app with a background location focus but ran into the same battery drain issue. We solved it and ended up pivoting to focus on free efficient location tracking and analysis tools (Cintric.com if you're curious).
Location is a really interesting space at the moment. Marketing and ad-tech use cases for location data have been advancing steadily, using location data to build rich profiles on consumers for better targeting. Many companies even measure the effectiveness of marketing on driving in-store visits and can optimize the timing of campaigns based on when they think you're going to go grocery shopping, etc. In the next year, we're even going to see the ability to use IDFA tied location data to bridge addresses & dollar amounts of anonymous credit card swipes to mobile-ad views tied to IDFAs. Which has very significant implications for measuring the effectiveness of campaigns.
On the consumer side, I've been surprised that use cases for location data are lagging a bit, and are overwhelmingly about a user's current location instead of going a step further into understanding that user or their context. Acceptance of background location tracking is certainly the first step though, any plans to dive further into context with Zenly? The new Android Awareness API and Sense 360 are pretty neat tools for this.
Hi @connorbowlan, we share the exact same vision around data & context.
We had to crack precise, low-power, and realtime location first in order to work on context next.
It's the path we chose to ensure enough user value to justify continuous location.
Now that our users generate a hundred million location points a day, we are able to start learning from them.
In the next few weeks we'll be pushing frictionless content around things like togetherness, predictions and places.
Our data team has been hard at work on the subject for over a year now!
Android Awareness is going to be awesome for that, and we also expect / hope for announcements @ WWDC.
@connorbowlan just discovered cintric. looks awesome what you can do with location analytics. is there a server side API as well? what would IDFA be?
zenly is my favourite ice-cream flavor, love the new logo, emojis and the go feature are the best. looking forward to send quick picture to alert friends when we are close to them, love the team ❤️⚡️🍦
Hey @louis_malfoy care to pass by our office & design an emoji like you did for custom filters in @snapchat?
Realtime location share feature makes me remember Glympse (http://glympse.com/) but your UX rocks man, it's pretty easy to use and I really like the interactions.
Great app.
I feel like there is a good idea in this space. Sup and Drop Messages are doing something vaguely similar too.
I just wonder why Zenly felt the need to add emojis and battery life as part of its core offering. I think focusing effort on something more substantial to make the app stand out would be better. (just my opinion)
As Ive said previously, I feel like this would work well as an invisible app/chatbot
Hey @bentossell you are on the spot for the invisible app! We are working on integration to Alexa, and have an internal slack bot that responds to questions like “where is Ben?” or “when will ben come back from lunch?”. We’ll be opening up a few APIs in the coming weeks and look forward to what will be built on top.
Battery life - We used it during the development process as a way to get quick feedback on our latest battery optimizations when out of the office. Beta users loved it so much that we couldn’t take it out…
Emojis - 1 in 4 sessions is followed by a communication. People have been bullying us so that we’d allow them to communicate in-app. You have so much context in Zenly (close friends, location on the map) that often you don’t need a complete text message & a real keyboard to share an intention. The feature is a month old, and we discovered that users make riddles to make plans :
“Yo + Pizza + ?”
and the following response:
“Thumb down + Sushi + ?”.
We rolled out a custom one for PH btw :)
Battery life - We used it during the development process as a way to get quick feedback on our latest battery optimizations when out of the office. Beta users loved it so much that we couldn’t take it out…
Emojis - 1 in 4 sessions is followed by a communication. People have been bullying us so that we’d allow them to communicate in-app. You have so much context in Zenly (close friends, location on the map) that often you don’t need a complete text message & a real keyboard to share an intention. The feature is a month old, and we discovered that users make riddles to make plans :
“Yo + Pizza + ?”
and the following response:
“Thumb down + Sushi + ?”.
We rolled out a custom one for PH btw :)
Very nice App! I've been using it on daily basis for a while now. Efficient and very useful. The UX is also very impressive! Congrats guys!
I am very impressed by the cross platform live-location sharing feature! Very well done guys!
