Fernando here from Basement. This is pretty spot on. The greater level of intimacy leads to far more interaction since you're pretty free to be yourself and post content that is meant for your actual friends to see instead of random people viewing your perfect life. The intuition is naturally that fewer friends would limit usage, but in fact, it's responsible for the high levels of interaction.

As for the revenue – there are certainly cool opportunities to run relevant ads when you have high levels of attention from someone and their close friends (think group experiences, people buying things at the same time that their friends, etc). That said, we don't like what ads have done to current social platforms. They misalign incentives where the more money the product makes, the worse the product tends to get for users. Snapchat was pretty fun until it went from only seeing friends to seeing celebrity gossip and repetitive ads. Because of that, we're planning on doing a subscription model down the road, similar to what WhatsApp tried out before it got acquired (first year free, then a small fee.) Certainly a new model for a social app, but we think it's the best direction for us long-term.

Thanks for jumping into the thread.

I took your app for a spin and was expecting to be asked to give it access to all my contacts, but was planning to click the fine-print option for "No thanks, I'll just invite people manually one at a time" .. but then there was no option, just a mandatory Enable Contacts button with no explanation other than, "Your parents are not on Basement".

I'm not gonna tell you how to keep your gate, and maybe I'm not the target demographic, but it would be nice for the app to explain what it was planning to do with that permission before requesting it.

Asked the same question above also. How would this be different from whatsapp group?

For what it's worth, I'd love to pay for something like this. I hope you guys win the internet, as long as privacy is at your core.

Completely agree with your perspective on existing social platforms and think it's awesome that you guys are trying to break from ad-generated revenue. Any chance you'd go with a freemium model vs. free trial?

Jeremy from Basement here. We're considering a freemium model, maybe turning the font of people who don't pay to comic sans :)

Cruel but brilliant.

I completely get the appeal from a user perspective. From a revenue perspective, are you saying deeper interactions could be used to justify more expensive ad buys to counter lower volume?