This depends directly on whether my friends will pay to be on that network. Game servers are a great example. I will pay if my friends are also on the same server.

The problem is, there are way too many free options for us to organize. And this doesn't bring anything to the table which is spectacular.

What would you consider spectacular? Social network app that delivers crack cocaine by a drone? The grail of immortality?

Great question. I feel like we have two kinds of social networks right now parasocial (tiktok/instagram/etc.) and social (facebook/reddit/etc.). And there is a huge lack of good second ones. A spectacular social network for me would focus on social relationships and do something to facilitate making new ones online.

I would agree with your categories there. Circles is clearly in the second category & although it's early days our aim with the product is to build a great utility for your social life, rather than yet another media saturated app.

For the desires you've stated above, is there any product that comes close?

Nothing comes close. I feel like there is a lot of emphasis on content discovery but none on people discovery. The biggest problem I have right now is its hard to find like minded people. Maybe subreddits come close but they are not as social as I want them to be. Like I don't really know these people. Our bond seldom goes beyond our shared interest in the subreddit topic. But in real life people meet over a shared topic but it expands into a more fulfilling relationship.

After writing all this out I feel like what I want is ok cupid but for finding friends. The problem with that seems to be every time someone tries to do that they have one leg in the dating world (and I understand why, its lucrative). For once can someone actually put people discovery at the center of their product?

That's really interesting - do you use anything like Meetup.com or are you on any discord/slack servers?

There is a cool app that I've been using called Lunchclub (https://lunchclub.com/), it links you with another person one time a week. Might be worth trying if you haven't already. Otherwise I'd really been keen to chat on how we could solve that problem!

Completely true about the people discovery apps (probably why most of them end up as dating or a hybrid dating/networking), so in my experience it seems that the only thing that overcomes this is strong interest based products focused on groups.

I do use meetup and weeples but they are ... not online native. I would love to chat more about this if you can provide a channel.

I think you're on to something

Great points.

That's a great point. Our baseline assumption has been that, by and large, people would not pay for a social networking function on its own. So in that we've been hesitant to talk about monetisation with future features.