Written by guest author Manan Rokani, founder of Bond
To give you a little background about me, I grew up in India, moved to the US about 9 years back.
I went to grad school in Chicago, lived there for about 5 years and then moved to California around 4 years back for work. I have lived in different places but everywhere I have gone, I have met amazing people and made really good friends. Also professionally, I've met some really smart people at every company I have worked at. But what I realized was that, as soon as I moved or switched jobs, I was not able to keep in touch with the people there. You know how it is sometimes, out of sight is out of mind.
It was my 30th birthday last year. I got lots of calls, texts and Facebook messages from friends and family. I felt guilty that I was no longer in touch with a lot of them; just because we don’t go to the same school or college any more, live in the same city or work at the same company any more. These were all the people that I was really close to at one point but then life happened, we went in different directions and got so consumed in our new lives that we just completely lost touch. I wanted to change that. I started looking for apps that would help me get better at keeping in touch with people but I could not find anything good. I put together a small team and we decided to build one ourselves. The result was Bond.
We wanted to build something simple with a great user experience. I had the design and the flow in my head so I quickly built the mock-ups and our developers got to work. We got to mvp in 6 weeks, spent another 6 weeks polishing it up and pushed the product to the app store. I only invited a few friends, family and colleagues to help us test the app in beta. Because we were in the app store, we also started getting some organic traffic. I was also going to a lot of meetups here in LA trying to get the word out about the app. I was getting pretty good feedback from everyone who saw the app.
See the lineup of Tech in Motion meetups across the country and RSVP to attend here.
From the initial feedback we were getting, we knew that we had a decent product in hand. But we had to get it validated from a larger audience. We submitted the app to Product Hunt...(Note: Product Hunt is a curation of buzzworthy new products, every day. It started as an email list and evolved into a competitor of TechCrunch and other tech blogs with it's ability to surface the latest mobile apps, websites, and tech products that everyone's talking about.)
We honestly weren’t expecting much. But to our surprise, we were trending as the #1 app on their website the following day. I didn’t realize what that would mean until we looked at our numbers. In the first two days alone we got more than:
- 13,000 hits on our website
- 2,000 app downloads
- Tons of emails with a lot of good feedback, suggestions for features and requests for the Android app.
More importantly, these were founders and CEOs of some famous startups, product managers at some top product companies like Apple and Nike, designers, developers and some other tech influencers. These people build amazing products that we use every day- their feedback really mattered.
Soon, other tech websites and bloggers from different parts of the world started writing about us. ABC7 News did a piece on us too. Now the word is spreading.
Product Hunt gave us an amazing platform to put our product in front of the right audience and it really helped us validate our idea. But there’s a lot of people out there who obviously still don’t know about the app and we want to be able to reach them. So growth is our primary focus right now and at the same time we’re building more ways for people to bond with people in their networks. We’re really excited for everything that’s coming up.
To become a Tech in Motion demo company like Bond, contact the organizer in your city.
Keep in touch with people that matter to you by downloading the app. If you have any feedback or suggestions please feel free to email us at suggestion@getBond.co.
About the author:
Manan Rokani, Founder of Bond at www.getBond.co, is passionate about building Internet and mobile technology. With more than 7 years of experience working as a tech consultant for Fortune 500 companies as well as an entrepreneur in the start-up environment, he has now founded multiple companies including Bond. Bond is a simple app that reminds you keep in touch with people. There are different ways to keep in touch with different people. The first version of the app had options to keep in touch with people through Call, Text and Facebook, and the new integrates with WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Emails. For each service, simply select the people you wish to keep in touch with and then how often you’d like to contact each one of them. Once set up, the app schedules regular reminders for you. When you get a reminder, just swipe the notification open and you get an option to contact that person right away, leaving no room for procrastination.
Download the iPhone app for free : https://appsto.re/us/ggTu1.i
Sign up here for Android : http://www.getBond.co/android/