Introducing Stamped
Today, after months of hard work, we’re very excited to announce that Stamped is now available in the App Store. It’s been a fun journey building this product, and we wanted to take a moment to explain why we made it.
We built Stamped because we think social products can be useful, as well as fun. We want Stamped to solve a problem, not just be another app that asks you to share for the sake of sharing.
The problem we’re trying to solve is noise. Specifically, there’s too much of it today when you try to discover something new online, whether it be a restaurant, book, movie, or song. What does 3 stars from 70 strangers mean? Is that good or bad? Can I trust this person’s opinion? Who is he/she? If you’ve ever asked these questions, you’ve experienced the weaknesses of current review and rating sites.
So people turn to their friends for recommendations, because they know they can trust them. They know who their friends are and they know what their recommendations mean. A foodie friend knows great restaurants, for instance, and a film-buff friend knows all the best movies.
But people exchange this incredibly valuable information in a fragmented, inefficient fashion. Long email threads, last-minute calls, mass text messages; these are all ways in which we use our friends to find something great, but the information is often not as usable or ever-lasting as it should be.
We believe that technology can and should make this better. There should be one platform for friends to share and discover what they like best, and it should be simple and fast to use. That’s what we’re building with Stamped.
Every decision we made when building Stamped was designed to make the platform as useful as possible, and to incentivize quality over quantity. If there were places where we could reduce the potential for noise, we tried to do so.
Here are some examples of how that mindset influenced the product:
- Everyone only gets 100 stamps to start, but can earn more if their friends like what they recommend. This makes a stamp valuable, and rewards people who share things that actually help their friends.
- The stamps pane is structured more like an inbox as opposed to a feed. It’s a timeless repository that you can search through, map, or filter by category. It’s designed so that the last 10 shared things aren’t the only things you can find.
- Nearly all stamps are connected to structured data from Google, iTunes, Fandango, and Amazon so you can bring up a map, preview a song, or even go buy a movie ticket.
These kinds of decisions have hopefully added up to make a product that is simple, fast and, most importantly, provides real value to your life. We hope you’ll turn to Stamped when asking yourself “What movie do I see next?” or “What restaurant should I go to tonight?” and discover useful inspiration.
This is our first release, so if you have ideas or suggestions, or just want to send an epic rant, don’t hesitate to email our team directly at everyone@stamped.com.
Now go put your stamp of approval on the world!
(And download the free app at stamped.com/download.)
- The Stamped team
We built Stamped because we think social products can be useful, as well as fun. We want Stamped to solve a problem, not just be another app that asks you to share for the sake of sharing.
The problem we’re trying to solve is noise. Specifically, there’s too much of it today when you try to discover something new online, whether it be a restaurant, book, movie, or song. What does 3 stars from 70 strangers mean? Is that good or bad? Can I trust this person’s opinion? Who is he/she? If you’ve ever asked these questions, you’ve experienced the weaknesses of current review and rating sites.
So people turn to their friends for recommendations, because they know they can trust them. They know who their friends are and they know what their recommendations mean. A foodie friend knows great restaurants, for instance, and a film-buff friend knows all the best movies.
But people exchange this incredibly valuable information in a fragmented, inefficient fashion. Long email threads, last-minute calls, mass text messages; these are all ways in which we use our friends to find something great, but the information is often not as usable or ever-lasting as it should be.
We believe that technology can and should make this better. There should be one platform for friends to share and discover what they like best, and it should be simple and fast to use. That’s what we’re building with Stamped.
Every decision we made when building Stamped was designed to make the platform as useful as possible, and to incentivize quality over quantity. If there were places where we could reduce the potential for noise, we tried to do so.
Here are some examples of how that mindset influenced the product:
- Everyone only gets 100 stamps to start, but can earn more if their friends like what they recommend. This makes a stamp valuable, and rewards people who share things that actually help their friends.
- The stamps pane is structured more like an inbox as opposed to a feed. It’s a timeless repository that you can search through, map, or filter by category. It’s designed so that the last 10 shared things aren’t the only things you can find.
- Nearly all stamps are connected to structured data from Google, iTunes, Fandango, and Amazon so you can bring up a map, preview a song, or even go buy a movie ticket.
These kinds of decisions have hopefully added up to make a product that is simple, fast and, most importantly, provides real value to your life. We hope you’ll turn to Stamped when asking yourself “What movie do I see next?” or “What restaurant should I go to tonight?” and discover useful inspiration.
This is our first release, so if you have ideas or suggestions, or just want to send an epic rant, don’t hesitate to email our team directly at everyone@stamped.com.
Now go put your stamp of approval on the world!
(And download the free app at stamped.com/download.)
- The Stamped team
