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Zenly starts again after being shut down. Can the new company built by 10 Lianchuang still achieve miracles?

Perhaps no one expected at the beginning of 2022 that Zenly, which had performed well, would be shut down. After the news came out, many users also expressed their reluctance on social networks. However, the social model created HE Tuber by Zenly and the user needs discovered have been noticed by more companies. The founder of Zenly founded the company Amo and continues to launch new social software.

At the beginning of every year, many people include “social detox” as a New Year’s resolution.

The main reason for being invisible on all social platforms is that today’s mainstream social software can no longer meet our most authentic and sincere social needs. Instead, Internet celebrities and algorithms compete for traffic. This is why, it seems that a New social software emerged, hoping to save the status quo of “social is dead and traffic is king”.

1. Zenly’s new works: three “locked” social media

In the past two years, French startups have created many popular social software such as BeReal and Yubo . They all focus on real-time and real-time "filter-free" social networking, and the one that has attracted the most attention in recent months is Amo, which launched three social software in two months .

Headquartered in Paris, Amo has had its own brilliance since its inception, because its founder is Antoine Martin , the founder of Zenly , who was previously a hit. Not only that, Amo also has 9 other co-founders, all of whom have worked at Zenly for more than 10 years. For six years, the fields involved products, software, design, etc.

In November this year, Amo launched its first software- ID . Users start with a blank canvas and can use stickers, photos and text to design on the canvas to express themselves. Just like the creative boards on Pinterest and the stickers plastered all over the computer, users can also be as creative as they want on their IDs, such as Create a corner dedicated to your trip to collect travel highlights, or express your interests and hobbies with photos and stickers.

The social element of ID is that users can view their friends’ creations and add designs to their canvases. Before officially using ID, users need to invite a friend to join, and they also need to open their address book permissions to the app. This is what Ammo is for. Design that wants users to deepen connections with existing friends rather than focus on discovering new content.

As users use it, the ID canvas will become more cluttered, but this is exactly the effect the Amo team wants. Antoine Martin said that our real lives and personalities are disordered and are not as perfect as refined photos. And ID brings a sense of depth and space that Instagram’s photo grid can’t provide.

ID by Amo

Amo's second software is called Capture . It is a camera and photo sharing software. There are three camera modes: normal photos, enlarged photos and front and rear camera shared photos. It is similar to the real and natural style advocated by BeReal. There are no previews and With the text editing option, photos taken by users will be shared to the "Moments", encouraging users to share in real time.

In order to add a personal touch, Capture allows users to choose from a variety of camera settings such as color temperature, filters and preset parameters. Once selected, all photos will be displayed in this style. Users can also add customizations when editing. Emoticons, text and paintings encourage not the careful adjustment of each photo, but the presentation of the user's personal style.

When the user views a friend's photo, the static photo will become a dynamic photo. Capture will also add some tactile effects. For example, when tilting the phone back and forth, the photo will feel vibrating in the hand. The user can also comment on the friend's photo and view the photo. Shooting location, etc., Capture shows everyone's life more vividly to friends, and makes it easier to follow each other without social pressure.

Capture by Amo

In December, Amo launched its third software - Location . This location sharing software brings people back to the Zenly era. Users can check the location of their friends on the map and understand what they are doing. They can also send messages and emoticons, and privately poke. They come to make an appointment to meet. At the same time, Location is integrated with the map application, which not only displays the distance between friends, but also calculates the time required for walking and driving. It supports users to navigate with one click or open a taxi app, and encourages real people to meet and interact offline. Users can set different permissions for different software, such as sharing photos with certain friends and only opening location sharing to close friends.

Location by Amo

Amo's three software all have the same theme, which is to encourage users to interact more with existing friends to deepen friendships, which is completely different from many current social software that focus on the discovery of new content and new friends.

In a LinkedIn tweet announcing the launch of Amo, former Zenly MD Michael Goldenstein (also one of the co-founders of Amo) wrote: “Today’s social software has become an overly commercial super app that no longer puts the needs of users first. In the first place, it is more about serving advertisers that can bring benefits. For example, software like TikTok uses algorithms to keep users on the app, while Amo’s current three software use limited content to let users understand it in a short time. Friends updates, and then you can return to real life.”

In terms of user growth, because every time a user joins any one of the three software, they will see their friends’ files in several other software, and will also receive news about their friends’ activities in all software, and use three software at the same time. The experience is also better.

In March last year, before Amo officially launched the software, it completed 18 million euros in financing led by New Wave. Coatue, DST Global Partners and about 80 angel investors also participated in the investment. Amo's valuation reached 100 million euros. The Amo team’s experience in creating the legendary Zenly has helped them do a lot of marketing.

2. Zenly: A social legend of a generation

In this era where social networking is dominated by FB, Instagram, Snap and TikTok, new social software must have a "special trick" to stand out.

Zenly's functionality may sound too simple: users can see their friends' real-time locations on a map. This is not much different from Apple's own "Find Friends" function, but the highlight of Zenly is that users can chat and navigate to meet while checking the location of their friends. It is this social attribute that makes Zenly completely popular.

It does not encourage users to complete all social interactions on the app, but hopes that users can meet more offline. For example, if you see several friends in the same place, Zenly will encourage you to initiate a chat to see what they are doing. What and the navigation to join them, this gives Zenly a differentiated competitive advantage in the competition with other social software, and it has won praise from users and investors in the early stage.

Zenly app

Five years after its establishment, Zenly has successively completed a €11.2 million Series A round led by Idinvest Partners, Niji and Xavier Niel and a €22.5 million Series B round led by Benchmark. In 2017, Snap completed its acquisition of Zenly for $200 million and allowed it to operate independently.

Many people thought that Zenly's journey would be smooth sailing. Unfortunately, Zenly was not spared in Snap's round of layoffs in 2022. Snap not only announced that it would completely close Zenly, but also laid off all members of its team.

Snap’s decision surprised the entire Internet, not only because the birth and growth of Zenly have attracted much attention, but also because Zenly performed very well until it was shut down. In early 2022, Zenly’s monthly active users reached 3,500 Ten thousand, with over 3 million downloads per month, it often ranks among the world’s most downloaded social software lists. In markets such as Japan, Russia and France, Zenly basically never falls out of the top ten on the social list.

And just a few months before it was shut down, Zenly had just undergone a major update and added many features, such as allowing users to bookmark places where friends often gather, such as bars, gyms, and libraries, and search within these locations. , and Zenly also announced that it will launch map data and engines to compete with Google and Apple’s map functions.

Zenly user download statistics

The closure of Zenly points to two major reasons. First, Snap had previously launched its own social map application - Snap Map. It seems unreasonable to have two apps with similar functions running at the same time. Closing Zenly is less stressful than selling it to a third party; Second, according to internal Zenly employees, Snap’s leadership team often has disagreements with the Zenly team. The situation is even less optimistic after Lianchuang Antoine Martin leaves Zenly in 2022. In addition, some of Zenly’s most popular markets are not Snap’s. Zenly left the social stage due to various reasons such as focusing on market development.

As soon as the news of Zenly's closure came out, major media and netizens began to express their dissatisfaction with it. Technology media such as TechCrunch called it "the best social software", and Antonie Martin even directly @ on Twitter Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said he would regret closing Zenly, while Antonie also expressed his excitement about the new products to come.

Antoine's post on Twitter

Following the farewell of Zenly, the arrival of Amo can just make up for the lack of users' social needs. At present, it seems that Amo wants to do more than just copy Zenly, but to play a bigger game about "sincere social interaction".

3. Be sincere and not use algorithms

In recent years, new social software has emerged one after another. Several apps that have achieved viral traffic and explosive growth all have a common theme, which is to focus on "authenticity."

For example, BeReal, which was almost ubiquitous and used on the entire Internet last year, allows users to post once a day under the prompts of the app push. At the same time, the front and rear cameras are used to take two photos to show their current mood and what they are doing. The push prompt time can be at any time of the day, and users only have two minutes to post. This randomness and immediacy is to encourage users to post the most authentic photos, say goodbye to refinement and filters, and at the same time, through photos to pay more attention to your friends’ updates.

This original intention quickly gained support from young users. Relying on word-of-mouth from campus ambassadors, BeReal achieved explosive growth in 2022. The number of app downloads in the first four months of the year was close to 7 million, with monthly active users The number growth reached 315%. BeReal’s total financing to date exceeds US$100 million, with many institutions including a16z, DST Global and Accel as backing investors.

BeReal

Another app that dominated many app lists last year was Locket , an app that allows users to turn the “widget” function on their phone into a display wall of friends’ photos.

At first, it was just a private software developed by founder Matt Moss to communicate remotely with his long-distance girlfriend. Later, because many friends also wanted to use Moss, it was put on the App Store. Users can only add address book friends, and each one added to the Locket software Photos will be "launched" to friends' mobile phone screens, so that every day when users turn on their phones, they can see various updates about their relatives and friends. Locket wants users to divert some attention from blindly swiping their phones, specifically for Care about a truly close circle of friends.

Locket received 2 million user registrations 10 days after it was launched, and won the first place in the App Store social software list and the first place in the overall App list. It also won 2022 awards from Sam Altman and Mike Krieger, etc. Investments from multiple big names.

Locket Widget

Feels , a dating app that breaks the traditional left-swipe and right-swipe model , requires users to create complete personal information files and provide feedback on other users' profiles to express their love, and encourages users to connect through hobbies and values rather than simply looking at faces and data. It shows that the average user uses Feels for more than 40 minutes a day, and celebrities such as the famous football player Blaise Matuidi are also its users and investors.

Feels app

These software are the same as Zenly. They either maximize the social interaction between acquaintances or encourage sincere communication between strangers. The social model created by Zenly has become a new demand for users. After Zenly announced that it will be closed, including Life360, whoo, iHERE The fact that Zenly's alternative software has enjoyed a wave of growth dividends shows that the user needs discovered by Zenly have become "rigid needs" in the social world.

whoo

Amo, which claims to be an upgraded version of Zenly, is here. Whether it can recreate the miracle of Zenly is hard to say. It is a fact that existing social software is derailing from user needs. In the previous generation of social giants, they were competing to update algorithms that made users addicted. At this time, the new generation of social networking is relying on sincerity to win the hearts of users. If Zenly’s past glory tells us anything, it is that we don’t need too many friends, but sincerity is essential.

Reference sources:

With Amo's third app, the makers of Zenly release a Zenly-like app (TechCrunch)

Zenly co-founder returns with new social app company, Amo (TechCrunch)

Zenly is still hugely popular, so why's Snap shutting it down? (TechCrunch)

This Founder Created A Photo-Sharing App For His Girlfriend, Went Viral on TikTok, and Raised $12.5 Million in Capital (Entrepreneur)

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