7wks, 32 flights & 15 cities later
It’s good to be home..
It’s good to be home
I am finally home after an epic 7 weeks of travel during which I visited 15 cities in 10 countries, took 32 flights, and missed a few more. It’s been as exhausting as productive, with the key highlight being the first public release of Satlantis at BTC Prague.
Not only is the app now live and (mostly) usable, the team and I had the opportunity to onboard hundreds of new people and also to interact with, and receive feedback from them in person.
A big part of this feedback was to focus on the ‘tool’ side of the app, and ease up on the ‘social’ side. I’ll explain what this means in a future email, but for now suffice to say that we’re going to double down on the events product and collections. This is where the most utility is, and as Andrew Chen says in his book ‘Solving the Cold Start Problem’, we’re going to build Satlantis in a way where people ‘come for the tool, and stay for the network’.
With that in mind, here’s a short update on where we’re at since the last update.
The Good
Social:
Early on, we had an auto-follow feature to get your feed kickstarted. People didn’t like this, so we’ve replaced it with a “Suggested accounts” step during Sign up. In this way, new users have more control over who they follow at the beginning.
We also improved user account search, to actually find who you’re searching for, as well as comments, which are now ordered by social proximity so you see more relevant content first.
Sharing Events and Places also looks much better, and several improvements have been made to the mobile web and desktop web experiences.
Places:
You can now filter places by whether they’re Open Now! This was a big request.
We’ve also added a carousel of ‘Similar Places’ on desktop and redesigned the Suggested Places carousel in the Merchants tab so it’s no longer static and boring, but dynamic, showing different places on each refresh.
Much more to come on this part of the app.
🗓️Events:
Events are getting much better. You can now easily duplicate events with one click and for hosts, each new RSVP is an auto-follow, meaning they grow their audience with each event.
We are going to make the events experience as good as Luma over the next 3 months and we’ll also add Bitcoin payments. That plus the fact that this has social embedded will make Satlantis the #1 events app in the world.
📲Mobile:
Deeplinking is now live!!!
This means that as long as you have the app installed, Satlantis links will open natively in-app. In other words, you can send links to posts, events, places and accounts, which when clicked, will open natively in the app. It’s a much smoother experience. Try it now: here’s one of my posts.
Three more things on mobile:
- The global feed is richer, with a deeper content pool, and refresh is faster and slicker
- You can download photos and videos from the app. Just long press and click download
- You can also trim your videos during Post creation.
The Bad
🔔Notifications:
Notifications still suck. But we can only get to so many things at a time. We had to deprioritize.
👥Tagging users:
Tagging is not really there yet. It works on mobile, and we just released it on web, but it’s still unsupported both in the chat and in the comments on web. This will improve in subsequent releases.
🫥Edit username on mobile:
Users still can’t edit their username on mobile 🤦
The Ugly
🧑💻Sign up flow:
The current “suggested accounts” flow during Sign up needs a bit of beautification. We’ll also add more suggestions progressively, with accounts that are more active and producing excellent content. Keep an eye on this.
🗓️Events:
Past events, which currently are only showing on web, need to be added to the mobile app. We’re also tweaking cohost access: right now it’s all or nothing — cohosts have the same permissions as the main host. We want to offer the main host more control and granularity with access and permissions.
What’s next
The Europe tour gave us a lot of insight into what areas of the app are most valuable and where to double down. As I said, this next quarter will focus heavily on expanding the functionality of the events product and rolling out collections.
By the next update (ideally end of this month), this is what you should look out for:
Collections
This is the one to get excited for. Collections is a unique bookmarking experience that is part Pinterest pins, part Spotify playlists and part Google Maps lists. You’ll be able to curate your own collections, share them with your friends, family and audience, or keep them private so you can plan a trip and mark all the places you want to visit.
This will be a game changer & I’ll post a dedicated article covering this in more detail soon!
Events
- Dedicated tab on mobile: this has been sorely missing. Once done, you’ll be able to discover, join and share events from all over the world, on the go.
- Co-host invites: right now you can only invite co-hosts already on Satlantis or Nostr. With this upgrade you can invite by email, thus onboarding them to Nostr automatically.
- Event reminders: automated email reminders to attendees.
- External events: this will allow people to RSVP for events on other sites (eg; Luma, Meetup, dedicated conference sites, etc) but still save it to their Satlantis events tab in their profile, making it somewhat of a personal events wallet & making Satlantis somewhat of an aggregator for global events. Keep an eye on this.
There’s more in the works of course, including all the fixes and improvements of existing features. But let’s leave it here for now. I’m incredibly excited for you to watch this evolve.
Equity Crowdfund
Final note. You can own a piece of Satlantis.
- There is over $5bn in market cap between TripAdvisor, Meetup, Eventbrite and Yelp. I plan to obsolete these guys over the next 5–10 years, and if you think we can do it, it might be a good idea to own a piece of Satlantis.
- Satlantis is IMO the most important Bitcoin-adoption company in the world. I will write a dedicated piece on this in the next couple weeks, but suffice to say that we will onboard millions of merchants to Bitcoin without even uttering the word “bitcoin”. If you think this is a worthwhile mission, it might be a good idea to own a piece of Satlantis.
- We haven’t even started marketing the crowdfund yet, and have raised $150k. The minimum was $100k and the target is $400k. If you think we’ll blast through this, it might be a good idea to own a piece of Satlantis.
- Next year, we’re going to do a Series A, at a much higher val (probably 2–3x). If you think we’re on the right path and will achieve this, then of course, it might be a good idea to own a piece of Satlantis.
You can find all the information here on Timestamp.
Thankyou once again for your attention & support.
Stay tuned for new updates, and I’ll speak to you soon!
