The hacking begins.

The Problem To Solve

When we sat together that day, we came accross a pretty daunting experience in sharing our workflow and ideas to each other. I never worked with most of the engineers there before. There was no easy way to quickly set up a group chat. We had to rely on one of the messaging tools: Facebook, Skype or WhatsApp. Ultimately, we chose Facebook. The horrible experience started with having to find each other’s Facebook and set up a group chat. That endeavour itself required a lot of communication in real life. After about 5 minutes of browsing the site prolonged by another 5 minutes of multi-tasking and lag in communication, we were set. That’s 9 minutes 55 seconds too much.

Alternatively, we could have used Skype, but nobody in Hong Kong uses it, and WhatsApp, while being hugely popular in HK, requires that you share your phone number or email. People have trouble typing an email address. They also hesitate to share their phone number with people they’ve just met. And all of those tools had one problem in common: they require a long signup process for any new user to the platform. If you’re not already on the network, you don’t feel compelled to signup in the midst of a spontaneous conversation.

So we set out to create the shortest signup and the simplest chatting experience. Our goal was to allow any person to chat with people nearby in less than 5 seconds after they download the App.