tldr: I worked on a project with the goal of helping users stay in touch with their friends. I couldn’t find customers and stopped working on it.
myfriends.lol was a website, very much a Personal CRM, although I hate using that word. It was inspired by Monica, another product in this space. I felt the existing products were quite bloated so I decided to build this. It focused on one single thing: sending reminders to users to contact their friends. On signing up, users would add their friends, and how often they want to stay in touch: weekly, monthly, once every 3 months etc. Based on this, the app sends email reminders to get in touch with their friend, if they hadn’t contacted them.
This is all manual. There is no intelligence. The app only knows if the user has contacted their friend if they log their interaction in the history section.
I got one of my friends (thanks Mark!) to sign up for an account but that’s it. So I decided to shut it down.
I didn’t enjoy using it too much myself. There was only one instance during the 2 month period when I used it that I was happy seeing a reminder notification and thinking: “Yes! It’s been a while, I should call this person”. Other times, the reminders felt like noise, and something to “get to”. The opposite of what friendships should feel like.
I still believe that in the future these kinds of memory augmentation tools will become more common. We need to figure out the right interface for it. We already use the contacts app on our phone to remember phone numbers, and don’t think it’s cheating or unfair when we find others using it to remember our number. I feel we will have the same reaction in the near future when we see others using tools/software to improve their relationships. Many people already do right now. Personal CRMs are used by thousands of people the world over to stay close to friends and family. They were also a big trend in 2019-2022 during which many companies popped up offering their version of the product.
A product that helps improve relationships must have deep integration to the operating system. Ideally a superpowerful contacts app that knows when you call, text, or WhatsApp/Signal a contact. Using this information it can then figure out on its own who the most important people in your life are, and help you improve the rest if you care to. This sounds quite dystopian, not to mention a privacy nightmare. And I also I’m not sure who the target audience is. But I feel something like this is a natural extension of the product that exists today in this space.
my friends was built with React, TanStack Router, and PocketBase. It used Polar for payments and processed a total of $0 in revenue. It was deployed on Hetzner via rsync, now that's some gangster shit.