Apptisan #013 — Retro
Retro is a social app that feels like a joy, not a habit. It’s a friends-only photo journal where you share for yourself as much as your friends. It gently nudges you to find at least one moment each
Name: Retro
Developer / Team: Lone Palm Labs
Read this newsletter issue in Chinese (中文) .
Please describe your product.
Retro is a distraction-free social app that helps you reconnect with friends and build a photo retrospective of your life, one week at a time. Last year, we launched the ability to share weekly highlights with your friends, recap those highlights for Instagram, and print and ship any photo as a postcard to any address in the world. Now, with Journals, you can build retrospectives across any theme.
Post highlights of your week: Retro allows you to post highlights of your week by selecting and sharing your favorite photos.
See your friends’ highlights: Stay connected with your friends by viewing their weekly highlights.
Add friends: Easily add friends on Retro to expand your social circle and connect with more people.
Give friends keys to see past 4 weeks of your profile: With Retro’s unique "keys" feature, you can give friends access to view your past four weeks of highlights.
Make journals to share with friends or keep for yourself : Create collaborative journals to share with friends or as personal albums for yourself. Curate and share photos around specific topics or events.
Make recaps: Retro helps you create weekly, monthly, and yearly recaps of your highlights or journals.
Send postcards: Choose a picture or recap from your highlights and send it as a personalized postcard to friends and family, completely free of charge.
Was there a pivotal moment that inspired your product’s creation?
Before Retro, Nathan & Ryan first worked together when they led the launch of Instagram Stories. We started working on Retro when we realized something: after all that has been built in social since the iPhone, we now see less of our friends on social than we did 5 years ago. The apps that have traditionally served this purpose well have pivoted toward entertainment created by people you don’t know, and even though this content is entertaining, it also crowds out the other content that friends share with each other. So now we’re left sorting through a ton of message threads to see what’s going on with friends, or most commonly, we just don’t get that update at all. That’s a superpower lost.
Even though consumer social is insanely hard, we decided to do this together because it’s the app we wanted for ourselves, and we think it’s important that people have a place that remains dedicated to being the best place to catch up with friends and family.
What makes your product unique compared to others in the market?
Retro has many unique features, but what makes it most unique is how it makes you feel: it feels like a breath of fresh air. It feels just as good opening the app as it does closing the app because it helps you document your life and reconnect with friends without the ads or distractions of other social apps.
In terms of features, Retro is unique in that it is designed as a weekly photo journal that you can backfill with photos that are already on your camera roll and keep updated with new photos each week. You can send any photo, either your photos or your friends photos, as gifts in the form of physical postcards to any anywhere in the world - all for free. Finally, you can create a beautiful group photo album called a Journal if you’d like to share specific photos with only a specific group of people, whether they have Retro download or not.
How have you marketed your product, and what key lessons have you learned?
We’ve marketed the app via word-of-mouth, a little press, and the photos that people share outside of Retro as recaps on Instagram or as photo postcards in the mail. We’ve learned that people would rather just have all of their friends on the app already than inviting them directly, so we created Journals as collaborative photos albums to make it easier to bring people onto Retro by sharing a link with a full group or as a way to gather photos from all attendees of an event.
What has been some memorable feedback since your product’s release?
Early on, we had so many people post or reach out to us directly to say that they love Retro so much and that they really hope their friends will join. Which was interesting to us because they could just share that directly with their friends and get them to join themselves - its way better to have an endorsement from your friend than the app itself.
But what that feedback told us was that people are either reluctant to invite their friends directly or unsuccessful in inviting their friends directly. With that feedback in mind, we set out to create features that helped people show the value of Retro to their friends without having to invite them directly.
This includes:
Recaps, which makes it easy to recap your favorite moments on Instagram with a photo collage or video slideshow.
Free Photo Postcards that make it as easy to send a physical photo as it is to send a digital photo.
Group photo albums called Journals that make it easy to gather photos from any event with people that may not be your friends on Retro and even create a public link that allows people to view the photos on web without having a Retro account.
Are there any products out there that you feel deserve more recognition?
Read.cv is a beautiful alternative to LinkedIn for resumes, portfolios, and job listings.
Sublime is the best way to organize your thoughts and inspirations from around the web.
How We Feel is an incredible app for documenting and responding to your emotions.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you envision for the future.
My co-founder, Ryan Olson and I first worked together at Instagram when I was the product lead and he was the iOS lead for the launch of Instagram Stories. Our other 4 teammates are also former Instagram employees. We came together because we share common appreciation for craft and simplicity. We’re building our company on the conviction that the best things come from small teams of people with a shared passion and the right mix of talent, experience, and chemistry.
We’re an ethos-driven company, and for Retro, we wanted to capture some of the guiding ideas that went into this first version of Retro:
Remembering and appreciating life is an active process. Ferris Bueller was right: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” You’re likely already taking a ton of photos and videos on your camera phone. Retro helps you to pick the ones that you’ll want to remember each week so that you can look back on your weeks and appreciate all that has happened.
Social apps are better when everyone participates. Who wants to go out on a limb to share something small from their day when no one else is sharing small moments? Posting can sometimes make you feel vulnerable, like you’re the only one on the dance floor, and it’s so much better when all your friends on are the dance floor together. Retro gets everyone on the dance floor by nudging everyone to share at least once a week.
The ability to keep up with your extended circle of friends is a superpower. When your phone started shipping with a high quality camera, you suddenly had this amazing ability to see and be seen by almost all of the people you care about. That’s magic. But that magic is lost if there’s not a space that makes sharing those moments comfortable. Retro want to retrieve and sustain that super power for people.
Your apps should respect your intention and your attention. If you’re opening an app to see friends and family, it should be easy to see family and friends first. And you shouldn’t have to wade through a sea of other content and fall down rabbit holes just to get there. You should be able to close the app session and feel like you got exactly what you were looking for.
Craft means optimizing for people, not business. We appreciate the need to create a business, and Retro must become a profitable business if our larger company is going to serve the world in the way we hope. But we think there’s a difference between creating a thriving business and optimizing every pixel in your app for a business outcome. We’re optimizing for people first. In every detail of our product, we want you to see the fingerprints of a team that cares about your delight as an end in itself.
About Apptisan
Apptisan is a portmanteau of “application” and “artisan”, signifying “a weekly exploration into the world of apps and the passionate artisans who create them.” Each issue is a conversation with global creators, aiming to uncover and present intriguing products to a wider audience.
For those who prefer Chinese, you can subscribe via Quail. Creators interested in featuring their products are encouraged to submit them through our form, and we’ll be in touch promptly.
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