With social sites such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter it has been easy to market to a large number of people. Which means, learning to use another social network might seem contrary to what most marketers want. However, two of WhatsApp’s earliest employees have gone ahead to launch a new private social network called HalloApp.
Anyone can now sign up to use the HalloApp which is available in the Apple App Store and Google Play on Android devices. HalloApp and WhatsApp have a lot in common. This application is designed for group or one-to-one chat with close friends and family, the only way to find someone is to find out their phone number. Messages are encrypted, no ads.
HalloApp is currently divided into four main sections:
- the “Home Feed” which contains things your friends have posted,
- Group chat,
- One-to-one chat, and
- settings.
Currently, it has no algorithm that helps to sort posts or group chats.
Neeraj Arora, one of HalloApp’s founders, laid out the philosophy behind the social network in this article published by the company blog post on Monday, July 19th. Arora says HalloApp is where real conversations happen with real people, digitally.
“Imagine your feed wasn’t filled with people and posts you didn’t care about,” he wrote. “Imagine scrolling through meaningful moments and seeing what you wanted you to see—not what the algorithm wanted you to see. Imagine not being treated like a product.”
While other startups have worked for years to create successful social networking sites for close friends, the pedigrees of HalloApp’s two founders, Neeraj Arora and Michael Donoghue, make this extraordinary endeavor special. The two worked at WhatsApp before and after Facebook bought WhatsApp for $ 22 billion. Arora was the CEO of WhatsApp until 2018 and was a key figure in negotiating deals on Facebook. Dan Donoghue was the CTO of WhatsApp for almost 9 years before leaving Facebook in 2019.
Arora and Donoghue declined to be interviewed for this story because they wanted to avoid media attention in the early days of the app’s launch. However Christopher Lochhead was able to interview the two founders in his podcast show “Follow Your Different”. One of the statements Arora made was, “I think the best way to grow is to create an amazing product that people love to tell their friends and family about.”
