5 years in the making

Overnight successes are overrated (that’s if they exist at all).

On September 15, 2015, I started to design and build what was then called Leaflets. The idea behind Leaflets was that I would create cool and unique plans for a given day & time, viewable by all users within a given location. It was like meetup without needing to be member of a club. Users would log onto the app, select a plan and join. Once the minimum attendee amount was met, the plans would be “activated” and a group chat would open and those that decided to attend could chat and set up the plans. Great idea, right? Far from it.

What I not-so quickly learned:

1) It was a painstaking process as an admin to discover & manually create cool and unique activities in New York City that a bunch a strangers would enjoy together. Every place had to be spacious enough for a large group, in high traffic areas, & age appropriate (without even knowing anyone’s age upfront).

2) I quickly learned that no one really likes to meet strangers in this way. In today’s society, most single folks want to go out with friends they already know (more on that later) or go on a one-on-one date with someone they met on online.

3) I wasn’t really solving the right (and bigger) problem. Most folks didn’t really want and/or need to meet new people if we could help them better connect more frequently with the friends they already had.

4) Many folks had trouble pronouncing and understanding the name, Leaflets. Whenever I said the name of the app, it almost always required me to repeat the name more than once. “Is it ‘Leafless’ or ‘Leaflifts’ ?” “What’s a leaflets?” It was exhausting.

These issues lead me to make some changes into how I viewed the problem, thus how I viewed the solution...

There’s more where that came from.