A year ago Yobongo launched to help people connect and communicate more efficiently on iPhone. Since then, people have shared important moments of their lives, made new friendships, and kept in touch. From day one we set out to build a product and experience that was uniquely built for mobile - we’ve continually pushed to make Yobongo a polished, fast, and native experience.
It has been a whirlwind year and a half. It began with the two of us hacking away at coffee shops, then joining forces with our incredible investors and all along building a team of the most talented product builders out there. Today, we are excited to start a new chapter in helping people communicate. Together with Mixbook we will accelerate our efforts to help people communicate with their photos.
The entire Yobongo team will be joining Mixbook in Palo Alto and we couldn’t be more excited. Mixbook is the best way to quickly and easily create beautiful customized photo books, cards, calendars and more. They’ve quietly been building their company and they are absolutely crushing it.
We didn’t get to this point alone. We would like to personally thank our devoted users, our team, our investors, and all of our supporters for their constant encouragement and dedication to making Yobongo a success.
Caleb and Dave
Today we released version 1.5 of Yobongo, which allows you to access your private conversations from anywhere in the world.
Many of you have established new connections on Yobongo and rely on private conversations to keep in touch, but have been unable to send a private messages when visiting other cities. Today that changes.
We have a new home screen that allows you to quickly and easily access both the nearby conversation and private conversations. When you are outside of a launched city (San Francisco, New York City and Austin), you will be able to access private conversations, but will see our Vote Screen instead of a nearby conversation.
We continue our efforts to help people make new connections and communicate more efficiently. We think today’s update is another step towards that goal.
We’d love to know what you think of this update, send us feedback on Yobongo or via email to feedback@yobongo.com.
Since the release of Yobongo 1.4 on Monday, people have been sharing and discussing great photos. So we thought we’d share some of our favorites of the week.
Can’t Touch This
Taking photos of desktop objects proved to be a popular theme. David shared this photo of his MC Hammer bobble-head.
Words with Dogs
Many pet photos were posted, but Marcus’ photo of his iPad-loving dog wins this week.
Fueling a Monster Truck
Richard shared a photo of the gas pump. This photo sparked conversation both in the app and at Yobongo HQ. I’m still wondering what kind of car holds 32.5 gallons of gas?
Keep the awesome photos coming!
During Yobongo conversations, we’ve noticed people chatting about what’s around them—the food they’re eating, the crowd at the bar, a beautiful view, their pets, a great meet-up with fellow Yobongo users, a band they are seeing live, etc. We think photos are a great way to share these moments, so today we are introducing photos to Yobongo.
Many users have requested photos on Yobongo, on Twitter, during our Town Hall earlier this month, and in person. We agree that photos are a natural next step to make Yobongo conversations even more engaging.
Since the launch of Yobongo, we’ve been focused on creating authentic conversations. We believe that when people share authentically they can make real connections with others. Photos make the conversation more engaging and real.
Photos can be taken directly from the app or you can share existing photos from your library. Simply tap the camera icon to the left of the text box to add a photo. Photos are included as a part of your message. Photos are integrated in the conversation stream as a thumbnail and you can tap to expand the photo in the stream.
We encourage you to take photos of anything that will help spark conversation. We look forward to seeing how creative you can get with photos!
Download Yobongo 1.4 today from the App Store. As always, feedback is encouraged, so feel free to let us know what you think: feedback@yobongo.com.
While having a conversation you can often think of people who would love to participate or lend a unique insight, but reaching out to them in the moment isn’t easy. We wanted to change that. Because missing a great conversation is never fun, especially when the only reason was you simply didn’t know it was happening.
Today we are introducing new ways to solve this problem — Nudge and Around.
Nudge is a quick way to get your Yobongo friends to join the conversation. With one tap, you can quickly let them know you want them to join you. Simply swipe to the end of the faces in the top bar and you will see the new ‘Nudge’ button. You will see a list of the people who have recently chatted and the people who you have interacted with on Yobongo.
Around is a new way to discover the people who use Yobongo. We are constantly working to remove friction from the process of making new connections, and Around is another step toward that goal. With Around, you see people who have recently been on Yobongo around you along with their recent pondering and neighborhood at a glance. Making it easier to connect with people and strike up a conversation.
Download the new Yobongo version 1.3 in the App Store.
Today we are releasing a brand new version of the app — 1.2. This update is based entirely on feedback we’ve heard from you. We’ve made some key changes that make Yobongo a better experience for both new and existing users. To this end, we’re launching a couple new features that we hope you’ll like.
The first of these is multitasking - you can now leave Yobongo to do something else, but then instantaneously return to the conversation without missing a beat, making Yobongo more efficient when waiting in line at the coffee shop, or during your daily commute. This was the most requested feature, and it was really important to us to make it happen.
Next up, a new welcome experience that walks you through how to use Yobongo the first time you sign in. While many of you were able to sort out pretty quickly what to do when you joined, we wanted to make Yobongo more friendly to more people.
If you’re a Yobongo user, you’ve probably already noticed Ponderings. They let people know what’s on your mind and provide a springboard for conversation. Ponderings are short. They’re limited to 15 characters and are cleared after 24 hours, keeping them easily consumable and relevant. Some Ponderings so far include “Owning a Dog,” “French Press,” “Coachella,” “Xbox Kinect,” and many more. And, of course, “Bacon.”
Ponderings have the power to spark conversations between people who had previously never connected before on Yobongo. And this is only accelerating as people ponder more and more often.
Download the update today.
Yesterday we arrived at the office to find a lovely package from Amazon waiting for us. We all knew what was inside — our initial batch of Kindle’s for the team. Starting today, every Yobongo team member will receive a Kindle when they join.
Dave and I have, no doubt, been shaped by the books we’ve read. From books on design to books about the way people interact with the world, countless books have contributed to our views on the way to build great product and strong teams. We want to share these books and the insights they contain. To that end, Dave and I will be gifting many of our favorite books to the team, but it won’t stop with just us — everyone on the team will share the books that have shaped them too. Ensuring everyone has a Kindle makes this effortless and allows for instant access to any other book people are curious about.
We are building a team of passionately curious people and books are one way to feed that relentless curiosity.
Ensuring everyone on the team has a Kindle is one small gesture we are making to reinforce our commitment to fostering a world class team of people who are engaged with the world and constantly learning. Kindles are just the start.
We are hiring.
It has been a whirlwind month. We launched publicly, had a blast at SXSW, raised some money from an all-star group of investors and have been hard at work on improving the Yobongo experience for all of our users. We are continually humbled by the countless people who use Yobongo every single day to make new connections and share what matters to them in the moment.
Today we are releasing our first update to the app which we have been hard at work on since the day we launched.
We have fixed 20+ bugs, improved the apps launch time, and we are introducing something brand new — Pondering.
Pondering is a new way to share what’s on your mind. Need a caffeine jolt? Ponder “Espresso”. Planning a trip to Mexico? Ponder “Trip to Mexico”.
When you Ponder something it is displayed on your Profile Card and subtly alongside your name in messages. You can quickly check what others are pondering as well as peruse the conversation to better understand what’s happening.
Ponderings are short. They are limited to 15 characters and are cleared after 24 hours, keeping them easily consumable and relevant.
In face-to-face conversations we benefit from a variety of additional layers of meaning and subtext in addition to the words uttered: intonation, inflection, eye contact, body language, etc. Digital communication lacks this humanity. We aim for Ponderings to lend more richness and humanity to the conversation.
Grab this update from the App Store today and start pondering.
We are ecstatic to share that we’ve closed an angel round from the finest group of investors in technology today. We now count people such as Dave Morin, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mitch Kapor, Shervin Pishevar, Karl Jacob, Dave Roux, Tim Davenport, Bill Raduchel, Lars Kamp, Carlos Garcia, Freestyle Capital, and True Ventures as investors.
When David and I started working on Yobongo people told us we were crazy - that it would never work. In the few days since launch we have been humbled by the tens of thousands of people who have downloaded Yobongo and the countless fun and interesting conversations that have taken place in each of the cities. From discussions about the best ice cream in San Francisco to an Apple retail employee in New York giving tips on how to get the most out of iPad 2.
This is just the beginning. We are extremely fortunate to have investors who have built massive consumer web services, helped shape an industry, or run durable meaningful companies at scale. Yobongo is still a team of two, but this investment will allow us to bring on remarkable engineers and product designers to make Yobongo more useful and fun. There is much to do, but now we have more horsepower than ever to make Yobongo the best way to connect with people nearby.
Back to work.
The wait is over, download Yobongo today, right now this very instant! Download from the App Store.
We are launching in San Francisco, Austin, and New York City first. If we are not in your city, don’t fret! You can vote to bring it to your city next :)
We thank you for your support over the past months as we have been beta testing Yobongo — your emails, tweets, and kind words have helped our tiny team get to this point. We hope Yobongo is everything you hoped for and more. We aim to make Yobongo the best way to connect with people around you and build authentic friendships.
Let us know what you think, report bugs, and please help us spread the word! Tell your friends.
This is just the beginning.
