Hello friends and Happy New Year! Let’s see, it’s only been like, 2 years, since I last posted. So it seems like the first day of the year is the perfect time to get back to writing. Many of you reading this were some of our very first users at DieHappy/goHappy (And yes, we know. we know. Everyone loves the name change. :)) We’ve learned a lot over the last 2 years about how we can best help people nurture their important relationships, and how our app (well, I should say Shawn and team’s app!), could be helpful in that effort. After ENDLESS conversations with users from over 100 countries, one of the biggest takeaways is that users want to be authentically sharing life with their family and friends, beyond just a particular event or moment. Free from the noise of social media. And away from the chaos of group messaging.
Based on those learnings, they decided to rewrite the whole platform and it just launched! The goal is to make it easy, fun and efficient to do life with your personal “groups” of people, and the new app does just that! I thought it might be helpful to hear a quick overview of the new user experience, especially if you used the old one.
Here’s my real life example. Like most people, I have several different friend groups. I have my high school friends, my college friends, my work friends, my neighborhood friends, my supper club group, my extended cousins group (there are a ton of us!), so you get the idea. It’s just a lot to try and “do life” with these groups on the regular, but I want to be connected, but not for the world to see (or sell! Shawn loves to send me articles regularly about how everything I do or say online is being sold and how our Google Home is spying on us.) So now, in goHappy, I have “groups” for each of my groups!
Take for example, my college group (The MC Girls). I am not kidding when I say we have had a group text going on for about three years. Like daily or weekly. Three. Years. Well, one of the 11 of us has an android (you know who you are), and 90% of the time when we share pictures, she is the one saying “Did someone share something? I don’t see anything!” And not only that, the whole text chain falls apart. Like literally it becomes multiple text chains. Drives us nuts.
Once we set up our group in the goHappy, THAT ALL WENT AWAY! And not only that, we can have different streams within our group if we wanted! We could have one stream to chat about our college reunion weekend (which I will proudly add is in its 22nd year – every MLK JR weekend since 1997!), and another stream to talk about life or kids or whatever. You get the idea. Our weekend is right around the corner and the link to the rental house, everyone’s flight info, etc. as well as the chatting, all happens here and it’s just easy. You can even keyword search to recall part of your convos or search for old shared pics. One of my friends has 5 daughters (Lord help her) who don’t have social media, but three of her girls all use the app to share pics and videos with their friends, book clubs, school groups, etc. because it is completely private – just for them. To me that is what’s most exciting…I really don’t want my kids to enter the world of social media. Middle school and high school were hard enough without phones…and selfishly, I don’t want to deal with it!
So I will close with this…go check it out . Download the new version and give it a try. (If you had the old one, let us know and we can port your old pics over!) Get your family on, your book club, bible study, bike riding friends, school mom friends, etc. You can feel confident your life is private there and hopefully it encourages you to stay more connected. And as always, we welcome any and all feedback (way better to come from you guys than the wife – trust me), so please hit us up anytime! ☺ Happy sharing!
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