Building Atrable
Helping friends grow closer.
Loneliness and the difficulty of maintaining close friendships are significant social challenges. A 2021 Survey Center on American Life report found that 12% of U.S. adults reported having no close friends, compared with 3% in a 1990 Gallup survey.
I started Atrable to help people connect authentically with their friends—sharing what was actually happening in their lives and getting to know each other better. After building and launching the app, I kept rethinking how it could support closer friendships. These are some of the approaches I tried.
Started with a voice.
I wanted a place for everyday stories without the pressure of looking good on camera. My friends could record audio diaries and talk about what was happening in their lives.
What happened
My friends were excited that I had made an app. They signed up, but rarely came back. I reduced audio loading from roughly five seconds to under one second; faster playback didn’t give them a reason to return.
Let the story become a video.
I wondered whether audio alone wasn’t enough. I made a recorder that started with voice and let people switch on the camera mid-recording, keeping it all as one story.
Under the hood
In Flutter, I used FFmpeg through FFI to assemble the audio and video segments without re-encoding the entire recording. The engineering challenge was making that transition feel like a single continuous action.
What happened
Some of my friends recorded once or twice, but nobody kept using it beyond a week. After about a year of work, I had moved closer to a conventional video-sharing app—without a compelling reason for my friends to choose it.
A reason to come back, later.
A month. A year. Later.
I turned collections of diaries into time capsules. After a month or a year, the people included would be invited to revisit those memories and talk about them together.
What happened
My friends didn’t use the feature. Looking back, photo apps already offered ways to resurface memories. I was also holding onto the recorder I had worked so hard to build, rather than questioning whether this new idea was needed.
Interesting wasn’t enough.
In Georgia Tech’s Startup Lab, Professor Merrick Furst pushed me to ask whether a product was something people needed, rather than something they might find interesting.
I couldn’t answer that convincingly for time capsules. I removed the feature, even though I wasn’t yet ready to let go of the recorder underneath it.
What if sharing slowed down?
I tried making my friends’ stories scarce. Diaries were locked by default, and new friends started with two keys. When someone unlocked a friend’s diary, that friend received a key to unlock one of the sender’s diaries.
I hoped this would encourage more deliberate sharing and let people get to know each other gradually.
What happened
The mechanism added friction. Making stories harder to access didn’t make them more valuable; my friends could simply go back to the platforms where sharing was easier.
A new idea. The same goal.
I’m still working on Atrable, now with a new idea. The goal is still to help friends grow closer; I’m taking a different approach to getting there.
Check atrable.com for updates.