Using Tech To Be There For Each Other In Real Life

123 likes. 12 retweets. 928 followers. This is how we measure connection, friendship, and identity in 2019. Never before have we had such quantifiable markers of our relationships, and in the short time we’ve known them, never have we seemed less certain of what they mean.

But before we spiral into a Black Mirror episode, let’s acknowledge the obvious: social media is not bad. It was created to connect us to people and ideas. And it’s accomplished just that: this past week, Facebook reminded me it was my high school friend’s birthday, Instagram let me be a part of my cousin’s first week of college, and my iPhone allowed me to Facetime my 98-year-old grampa (with a dog filter on both our faces, of course).

These are all good, beautiful things. But if the original goal of social media was connection and if the deepest form of connection is spending time with the people we love, where did we lose our way?

Which leads us to the next question, with alarmingly common-sense answers: what effect is this having on us?

With such clear stats linking screen time to loneliness and depression, social media giants like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram are beginning to ask themselves important questions that cigarette companies (recently joined by e-cigarette upstarts like JUUL) have been asking for decades:

As someone who’s been fortunate to take part in these conversations, I’m deeply encouraged by how the answers to these questions have begun to shape the road ahead. Given the ingenuity of social media and the rapid pace at which it’s grown, we always knew we’d be playing catch-up. But we can no longer plead ignorance to the effects of screen-time and we know technology isn’t going anywhere. So how do we start building technology that takes account of the world it’s helping to create?

Everyone will have a unique voice in this conversation, but I believe social media was created to be a means of connection, not the place we connect.

For the record, I’m an unlikely guy to be making this argument. I’ve been five years behind every social media trend, and my favorite phone of all time is still the Razr (hard to beat hanging up on a flip phone). If high school had a “least likely to start a tech company” prize, I would have been a shoo-in.

My journey into the mobile app space has been an unusual one. A few years after law school, while practicing corporate law in Houston, someone I deeply love told me about the night in college when she was sexually assaulted. The conversation didn’t inspire me or give me some light-bulb moment. It wrecked me. I sat there that night, holding someone who I’ve wanted to protect for as long as I can remember, facing the fact that I hadn’t. That I couldn’t.

I know now that she’s never needed my protection. She’s the strongest person I know, and that conversation was a brave invitation to share a weight she had carried alone for so long. Years later, she still inspires me on a daily basis.

More research showed that most friends stop short of stepping in because they don’t feel like they have the “power or permission” to do so. After months of additional reading and conversations, we realized there was an opportunity for our phones to provide a degree of that permission between friends. By creating a messaging platform that was specifically designed for close relationships between roommates, best friends, and family members, and then equipping those users with shortcuts that make it easier to get together in real life, we could facilitate a circling effect that gave us and our friends the power and permission to be there for each other. The very earliest version of bthere was born.

bthere intentionally designs our features for users to spend as little time on their screens as possible. Once users create a circle with their friends, family, or roommates, they have access to streamlined shortcuts to get friends together in real life: group messaging, location-sharing, event planning, and safety features like battery life notifications, and a one-click SOS system. To earn rewards, users never have to pull out their phones or open the app. Just get together with members of your circle, and the coins start racking up.

At bthere, we believe everything is better together. We’re committed to building an app where friendship means more than an invite or a follow, and where having fun and being there for each other can always go hand in hand.

We’ve come a long way since that conversation in Houston that gave bthere its heart.

We kicked off our year-plus long beta program on select US college campuses in 2017 (University of Texas, University of Alabama, University of Mississippi, Texas Tech, and University of Arkansas). To date, bthere users have created 6,850 circles together and spent over 4.8 million hours together in real life.

The biggest measure of success for our team, however, has been the countless conversations we’ve had with users, educators, and advocates about what bthere means to them. Last spring, we sent a survey to each of our beta campuses. Here are a few of my personal favorite pieces of feedback:

Our beta users have given voice to bthere’s heart. We exist to (a) bring friends together in real life, (b) celebrate that time together, and (c) empower friends to look out and step in for each other.

Our time on college campuses has helped us realize that bthere is for everyone: not just women, not just college students, and not just people who want an easy and fun way to be rewarded. It’s for everyone, because everyone wants and needs real-life connection.

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