The way we conveyed the reality-check before building another social app

After a couple of months of hesitating between our beautiful idea of building an app for meeting new people, and my down-to-earth notion that building "the right social app" is an extremely naive ambition, my co-founder Eteri and I decided to stress test our concept via proper user research.

Our vision was that people do enjoy meeting other people for the sake of its own and that this was a signal of real actionable demand, not a virtual one.

So how do we prove this strong, but intuitive hunch right or wrong before actually building the app? Or at least how can we make sure that we are not completely delusional about it?

A survey for sure, but to mute possible biases, we needed to compare peoples' motivation with where their motivation really led them to in terms of connections.

So we designed a questionnaire about what people feel is missing in their social lives, what goals they have, and how often did they actually reach out and meet with someone in the past year.

We received more than 300 answers and quite a bunch of reshares.

I was stunned to see that the motivation of "Meeting people for developing my career or business" was not so popular and rarely led to actual connections compared to the motivation of "Meeting people is fun, I just love it".

Our respondents did feel the need to meet for work or other practical reasons, but those needs were not strong enough to go out regularly.

"Fun" was times more efficient in this sense. Sounds like we intuitively saw something pretty unintuitive!

As a byproduct, we received a handful of insights on what tools people used and which worked or didn't work for them. Great fuel for our next steps.