Faisal, Leon, Jesper, and others were some of my closest friends from high school. We talked about physics, effective altruism, why markets fail, and more.
After I graduated it became harder to stay in touch because it’s hard to make the time to call someone when you’re in completely different contexts and have a million other things going on. It always feels like you could be doing something more immediately tangible with your time than reaching out to a friend from a past life.When covid happened, I felt the same thing happen with a lot of my college friends.
The existing solution to this was supposed to be social media. I never once felt closer to my distant friends because of Instagram. I am friends with you because of the things we talk about or the experiences we shared. Instagram never felt like it enabled me to understand what my friends were thinking about.
The natural solution to this would be twitter. Why not get all my friends on Twitter and get them to share their thoughts there so we can discuss them in Twitter comments and stay in touch that way?
Well, that would be great. Except most of my friends are not on Twitter. And they don’t seem to feel the need to post their thoughts online.
Well, that sucks.I suspected the underlying reason was that Twitter encourages posting your thoughts only if they are novel thoughts. But when I am with you in real life, I don’t expect everything we talk about to be completely novel. So my cofounder, Justin and I asked ourselves…how do we get people to connect over their thoughts online without creating the same high friction experience as twitter?
The solution we came up with was Wander. Wander is a social media platform that only allows you to share links. You can share links to articles, podcasts, videos…whatever. and then your friends can comment on your post (the link you shared) thus, enabling discussion without the requirement for novel thought. This relies on the fact that the links people share tend to be things that naturally start discussions. Some of your friends will disagree with the premise of an article, they may think there’s a better way to solve the problem than the one the article proposes. They may provide context the article failed to mention. Videos, articles, and podcasts provide a great basis for starting engaging conversion without the burden of original thought.
Instagram / Facebook or even TikTok don’t do this to anywhere near the same degree. You have never spent 20 mins discussing an Instagram post. But social networks are hard to build. They face what’s called the “cold start” problem. Aka, it’s not valuable to people until other people are on it. But without other people already on it…why would someone join it? There are several ways to solve this.
We chose the “single player utility” method. Essentially, make Wander valuable even if it’s just you using it, and then it becomes ultra valuable when your friends join. To provide single-player utility — we solved a related problem that a smaller group of people face. Content management. It’s hard to keep track of all the articles you’ve read and want to come back to later or the articles that you want to read but don’t have time for right now. So we built a chrome extension and website that let you mark articles as unread or store them in collections.
The plan was, once you have enough people doing that…you throw in a feed and you have a social media platform built around discussing shared links!
Easy peasy….
We failed.
Here are some of the lessons we picked up along the way
At first, we picked the wrong group of users - intellectual students. When we started in the summer, we had pretty active usage from a bunch of students who were interning remotely. Like 40% of the students who came on the site read a post, and 15% of people saved a post to a personal collection (called playlist back then)