Since then we've grown to more than 5k users across nearly 1k groups and have sent out more than 100k update prompts. The premise is simple - social media stinks and you either don't see updates from people you care about (they never post) or you miss the updates (flooded by other people's updates or an algorithm that downplays an update you'd care about even if it's seemingly unimportant). And we're ramen profitable (more so now that we've migrated the majority of our infrastructure off of Amazon and especially RDS).
A few things we do - the main organizer of a group only ever has to login to create a group. They invite everyone else via email address to which they accept the invite. After that, they all (including the organizer) has to click the link they get regularly (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly) and submit a short (char limited) update. No logging in and no bugging people to login, download an app, rate us on an app store, ads, or anything else.
The system combines the updates into a newsletter and sends it to the group. The updates are NEVER published on the web (thus shielded from search engines and AI scraping) and you can never do a reply-all to a newsletter. You can click on a person's name to reply back just to them and strengthen your one-to-one relationship. You're welcome to saving you from a flood of "Congrats!" emails from everyone in the group.
We're reposting now because in the great Atlanta example of MailChimp, we're looking at stats and seeing this just grow on its own without any marketing from us. So we've been spending more time on it to migrate the infrastructure and codebase to something more resilient and are looking to expand usage and impact. Plus more marketing than just word of mouth. :-)
Free for groups <10 and bi-weekly or less frequent. Great for families, book clubs, alumni groups, companies, etc. And before you ask, we've raised no money and have fully bootstrapped this since inception. Criticism only helps us get better so feel free to roast us.
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