I'm nosy... who has done this? what is it and how much is it making? did you quit your job? did you get lucky? how'd you market it? I have so many questions...
ok so for context, I run a tiny company called LilyPadLabs. the "Lily" part is a family thing. the product is called YourPond, it's a personal CRM type app for keeping track of the people in your life (birthdays, gift ideas, where your friends moved to, that kind of stuff). the mascot is a little frog. I picked all of this ages ago because I liked the idea that your people are "YourPond" small and curated, not an ocean of followers. And it relates to my LilyPadLabs name
anyways.... I went to see Toy Story 5 and if you haven't seen it, the new toy competing for Bonnie's attention is a smart tablet. the tablet is shaped like a frog. the tablet is named Lilypad. and Lilypad's whole thing is getting Bonnie to talk to her friends through an app instead of seeing them in person. the app is called... The Pond.
I'm sitting in the theater like. a frog. a lilypad. a pond. an app that replaces real friendship with a screen.
HOWEVER... my entire app exists to do the OPPOSITE of that. the whole reason I built it is so you remember stuff about your actual people and go see them IN REAL LIFE. no feed, no algorithm. and then the biggest animation studio on earth releases a movie where the villian is a frog-branded Pond app that pulls a kid away from her real friends. they made my logo the bad guy lol
to be extremely clear because I do NOT want a lawyer email: I named and built all of this before that movie came out. I'm not claiming credit, they're not claiming credit, it's 100% coincidence. it's just the funniest thing that's ever happened to my little company and I wanted to tell Reddit.
I wrote the whole naming story up on my blog if anyone's curious (it's on https://www.yourpond.io/blog/why-its-called-yourpond ). and if anyone else has had a giant company accidentally step on your branding I need to hear about it
my iphone contacts is basically the same app i had in 2010. name, number, maybe an email or address or birthday, a notes field that I have random notes on people but nothing is structured.
i wanted something where i could filter my people by city, add someone new super quickly, get a reminder when its someones birthday or when i told myself id follow up, and actually own my own data (i'd never sell this data).
so i built one called YourPond and now when I travel somewhere, I can easily filter to see who is there and I get reminded about important events. I have a few people using it now but i was curious from this subreddit if there were other things that people are really looking for in a contact book of the future?
Apple Contacts and Google Contacts still do the same thing they did 10 years ago... a name, a number, maybe an email. I wanted a place to keep everything in my head organized.. where my friends moved, their partner's name, who introduced who, the marathon someone's running this weekend.
I posted YourPond here a couple months ago and got really helpful feedback. Here's what's shipped since:
Would really appreciate any feedback!! Even the small stuff helps a lot at this stage.