The Founding Team at Before You Apply Is Building Everyone—a New Kind of Social Network
We know from experience that diversity of thought starts by asking the right questions—questions that allow for context, and nuance, and a shared understanding.
~1-min read
Hey everyone! The founding team at Before You Apply is building Everyone: a social network for people of all stripes.
Imagine AskReddit meets Instagram Stories. And we're focused on trust-building as a design principle.
Why? The honest answer is that nobody knows where to go to have safe and thoughtful conversations around topical issues. There are few places online that allow for civil discourse and diverse perspectives—two things desperately needed for a healthy society.
As a result, the silent majority self-censors—too afraid to speak freely—and give way to the loudest few.
We know from experience that diversity of thought starts by asking the right questions—questions that allow for context, and nuance, and a shared understanding.
In practice: The app poses a single daily question to all users and micro-communities (public and private groups). Questions relate to trending topics and ideas. Anyone can answer. Through their answers, users reveal their values, beliefs, and life experience. This makes it possible for users to quickly build empathy for one another.
Think of Everyone as taking the most powerful component of the Before You Apply product—asking really great questions—and using it as the catalyst for building trust in an online social environment.
Side note: Now, the opportunity to give the outside world a look at how you (and your employees) think about important topics will be easier than ever. This will have strong application in the employer branding and recruiting spaces by helping teams create hyper-relevant content at scale.
We’re currently in private beta. If you’d like to join, here’s the gist:
We’re using Slack as a way to test some assumptions and understand the social norms and mechanisms that lead strangers to trust each other. And it’s going so well that we’re opening it up to more cohorts.
How it works:
We’re running 1-week cohorts of 10 people.
Each day we post one question to each cohort in Slack.
Beta users record their answers via selfie video.
The cohort engages, interacts, and reacts with each other’s content.
That’s it.
To get the spirit, these are some of the questions we’ve posed:
If you could snap your fingers, would you rather completely disappear from the internet or be a wildly successful influencer?
What's your favorite quote related to perseverance? Why does it resonate for you?
What would you rather be working on today?
What's your biggest professional regret?
Which makes you feel less free—knowing that the government is spying on you, or when the government tells you that you have to wear a mask? Why?
What would make you more proud to be an American?
What's something that's important to you today that you were discouraged from doing earlier in your life?
(This is an example of an answer. Grace’s story is amazing.)
Want to join, observe, or lurk? Learn more and sign up here. We’ll email you with more details.
Have a friend who might be interested in joining our beta? Tag them on LinkedIn.