Flamingle: The Newest Way for Gen Z to Build Communities Online
By Tamar Vidra
Being a college student was tough before the pandemic turned every item of life into a Zoom call. Yet, this bizarre time has also revealed the success of video as a medium to replicate in-person interactions and the relative ease with which Gen Z can adjust to a virtual environment.
While Zoom has become a subject of lamentation (let’s be real, even the Atlantic confirmed that no one wants another Zoom happy hour), asynchronous video apps like TikTok are still taking the world by storm. The new question entrepreneurs are trying to hack is how to unlock the potential of asynchronous video while maintaining the intimacy that so many crave during this pandemic.
Sophia Dew, co-founder of Flamingle, believes that she has cracked the code. Flamingle is a community-driven platform focused on communicating through asynchronous video. Essentially, the app allows members to create and join communities (or what the Flamingle team calls “mingles”) and engage by sending or reacting to videos. Think TikTok meets Slack, but with the sleekness and simplicity of Tinder’s interface. If this sounds like a glorious new third dimension of social media, you’re not wrong. I was able to get my hands on Flamingle’s MVP and saw firsthand how a vision for communities powered by video could be brought to life.
A couple of weeks ago, I chatted with Sophia about her journey with Flamingle. Emboldened by her ambitions to pursue entrepreneurship, Sophia decided to take a gap year in place of her junior year at Stanford. She describes her decision as accelerated by the pandemic, but also by the serendipity of meeting her co-founder, Natan. Through talking, Sophia and Natan arrived at the few core realizations that drive the creation of Flamingle: (1) most college students felt more isolated than ever during the pandemic, (2) existing social media apps struggled to form authentic connections, despite consuming hours of users’ time and (3) that Gen Z had shown an affinity for interacting through video.
With these insights, Flamingle was born — but first, with the wrong approach. The co-founders initially played with the dating-app model by collecting different videos of potential dating “matches” and manually sending them to people. Sophia summarizes that most of their feedback embraced elements of their idea, but felt uncomfortable with its applications for dating. The team then shifted gears and started sharing videos based on mutual interests. Eventually, Sophia found that she was grouping these videos and sending them between communities that were “not as tight-knit and intimate as a Snapchat group with your close friends, but not as formal or inauthentic as a Slack channel.”
In the midst of their journey, Clubhouse, the hot new audio-app, dropped. Clubhouse came as a huge encouragement to Sophia. In her words, “Clubhouse showed this huge need in the market. People want a new type of social media. The old things are getting old and people want something fresh.” Two learnings from Clubhouse for Sophia are that people really like to share but at the same time, they enjoy exclusivity and being part of a tight-knit community.
At Flamingle, Sophia applies these insights and others in her role as the chief technological officer. As Sophia explains it, this encapsulates the “whole product and it’s build” from design to customer discovery and brand identity. She spends most of her time physically coding and managing what the Flamingle team is up to, which often includes asking longer-term questions like “how’s it going to be built? How are we going to deploy it? And how are we going to get people to test it?”
On the other hand, Sophia tells me that she a “complete sucker” for UX/UI. At Stanford, she runs the club for undergraduate women in design. In designing the Flamingle app, she takes inspiration from the apps that she loves. For this reason, she says that Flamingle’s app “takes some aspects of Instagram’s feed and interactive elements, TikTok’s scroll view and addictive qualities, and the intimacy of Snapchat.”
Sophia is scientific in testing her designs. In her words, “the only way that you can find design flaws is through mass experimentation.” This requires a certain level of open-mindedness and humility:
“There are aspects that are so obvious to me, but to the user they are not. You have to really be empathetic and considerate of what their experiences are like. I talk to hundreds of users and then really start to get a feel for what I need to change,” Sophia reflects.
Whats next for Flamingle? Sophia is excited to be launching their ambassador program to build a community around Flamingle and its mission. If you are interested in being a part of the video revolution that values authenticity and meaningful connections, here is your chance!
Originally published at https://wave-columbia.medium.com on March 16, 2021.
