Looking For People Interested in Building "Village," Together :)

Hi guys! So, as some of you may know, for a while now I've been working on an app for single parents called the Village. The app's main purpose is to help the single parent to have and to build a support system with other single parents living around for via face to face experience of a play date, something that you as a parent would do anyways (depending on your kid's/ kids' age/ ages, of course).

I'm a UX Designer and Researcher, which means that I went to school to learn about how to design apps and websites, in addition to having a Masters in teaching and 2 Bachelors degrees (English and Philosophy). And, while doing my research for this app and interviewing a bunch of single parents, I time and time again learned that the biggest pain point, the biggest problem that they had was being all alone, not having anyone else to be there for them, and simply having no support system, no village, really - something that was a given back in the day (whatever that day was haha).

Some of us DO have villages, a support system, a close-knit family that we get along great and who are always there for us when we need help with childcare or if we need a shoulder to lean on or some financial support when we lose a job, etc., etc. But many of us do not have that. And, then, what are we supposed to do then, in those types of situations? If, as a single parent, you do lose a job and start to struggle to pay for your bills, is your first thought going to be "oh, I need to go to Facebook or Peanut and contact one of my 4k friends or my village and a close-knit community that I have there, and they will surely be there for me." I am not saying that Village will solve problems like these. However, I think that Facebook uses an EXTREMELY lose definition of a friend, because there is no way in hell that anyone can have 4,000 friends, especially if the way that you do become a friend on Facebook is by liking someone's pic or post and then sending them a friend request - which is pretty much how Facebook allows it. If I got into a car accident or my car broke down in the middle of a highway, my first thought would NEVER be to go to Facebook or Instagram or to my Tinder account. My first thought would be to think of 'who is ACTUALLY going to help me and be there for me..?'

To actually have a friend, this requires time and trust and things that the two of you share in common. I've thought a lot, a lot about this, about how much our communities have broken down, how these days most of us don't know our neighbors or talk to them (a friend of mine who is in her 50's told me about how back when she was a kid, it was a given that if her mom needed to go to a doctor's appointment or the like, that she's basically just run over to one of her neighbors and drop her daughter off with them - can you even fathom a scenario like that today? I know I can't, huh) - I've also thought a lot about what a friend really is and how we, as human species, need one another, we want to belong and we want to feel needed and like we matter.

I want to create an app where easy get-togethers with people that you basically live around are hassle-free, where it doesn't take weeks and months of planning and 45 minutes of driving to, once a month, just to be with other people. I mean seriously, we live around hundreds and thousands of people at any given time, yet we really don’t have much of an access to any of them, besides I guess Facebook? I BET that around me right now, probably even within a walking distance, there’s a bunch of other single moms, just like me, who also have same age kids as me, who are also asking the same kinds of questions in their lives right now about caring for their 5-year old kids, just like I am. However, I really have no access to those other single moms whose life experiences right now are just like my own. Yes, I know there’s NextDoor out there. Sure. However, personally when I think of NextDoor, I see is as a big bulletin board where people go to post and read about their lost pets or a water leakage somewhere or maybe selling or buying stuff or looking for someone to cut their grass, perhaps? NextDoor has A LOT of people on it, but the app itself does very littler to actually encourage people who are living around each other to actually meet. And, it’s definitely not single-parent focused at all. And yes, there is also Peanut, which I tried, briefly. However, it is ONLY for women, and ONLY for women who are motherhood focused in some way. I have no problem with that and I’m sure that it has helped many women who have used it. But, once again, from my experience it does not encourage actually meetings and face to face get togethers. What Peanut, like Bumble, like OkCupid, and like so many apps have adopted today, is the Tinder swipe of a yes or a no. And, that’s it. For me, when I used that, when I was going through that experience of the Peanut app, personally I felt really disgusted, because to me that is NOT how you make friends. Sure, for Tinder it works because Tinder is a dating app, and when it comes to dating the first thing that we look at is at their looks and if we’re attracted to them or not before we decide to invest our time into talking to them and digging in deeper. Do you use the same kind of concept when making friends? No, I don’t think so. I know I don’t. I care very little about what someone looks like when deciding if I want to be their friend or not. And yet, that is exactly what Peanut has employed. I remember swiping on Peanut on all these women where the whole screen was of their pics and what they look like, thinking to myself ‘I don’t want to date these women.. why is it that the main thing I see here is what she looks like? And then I swipe on if I want to be her friend or not? Jesus.. that is NOT how I make friends and that design feels lazy and just another Tinder copy.. ugh..’ A friend to me is someone who has similar experiences to me – at least THAT is what would most definitely interest me in wanting to be their friend.

THIS is the kind of thinking that I followed when designing Village app, which is where during the onboarding stage you answer a number of questions about yourself, and after that is done, THEN the app gives you 5 top parent matches that are the closest to YOUR life experience. Not an infinite amount where all you do is swipe, swipe, swipe with seemingly no end in sight. Nope. That can become EXTREMELY exhausting and tiring and all of those people literally just become numbers, no actual, real connections. I do not want to make yet another Tinder app for single parents. In fact, throughout the whole design and research phase of the Village, I was always very conscious that it will NOT be a dating app. I know that in our society there are big assumptions that if you are a ‘single’ parent, that by default means that it is not a desired state and you obviously don’t want to stay that way. And that might be YOUR case. However, I want to create an app where you can come to it and be your messy self and find that help and support and healing, and someone or a group of people who will be there for you and where it will be easy for you guys to actually meet and go for a walk at a park close-by or to get a coffee at that Starbucks down the street when you’re having a really off day…. Or to just sit on a park bench while your kids’ play together, and just talk, face to face.. And because your both single parents, you know exactly where their coming from and what they’re going through. It’s as easy as that. I want an app where maybe you did lose a job or your kid was super difficult today or a million other things… and you just want another human to connect with and it doesn’t require for you to date or seek out a man or a woman just to physically be with another adult…. You just need a friend and a compassionate ear, and an actual, face to face interaction, not endless posts and messages and hopes of meets and hangouts. If Village was a dating app or marketed as such, I think that it would be really difficult for you, as a single parent, to even think of it as a place where you can come to find help and healing, because, once again, dating is a VERY different sport. With dating you are trying to sell yourself and market yourself and hope that someone will want to buy you, or your time anyways. You will probably not go to your dating profile and talk about how much your kids suck or how you just lost your job..

Also, another thing that I have realized about why it is that we have all these apps like Facebook and Bumble and Instagram, etc., etc., where so many of us do have all of these connections and do meet and talk – online, - and yet, actual, physical meetings seem to be way more difficult to accomplish, but they are Oh, so much more rewarding in so many ways (you actually do build a very real support system when you do meet with people face to face, people who will come and help you in a car accident and where your whole friendship isn’t simply online-based, you know what I mean?). I think that the main reason, actually, is that NONE of these apps do enough. They leave most of it up to you to do, the user. And, what do I mean by that? Well, the time and the place of the meeting for starters. We are all very, very busy these days, and that is ESPECIALLY the case for the single parent. That doesn’t mean that we don’t want or require friends or a support system. We do. We all do. So, then, we swipe a bunch, or we chat on the app a ton.. Maybe at someone point someone does suggest a meeting? But, hey, they live 35 minutes away, and you have a super full schedule…. And now you have to invest a bunch of your time and energy and back and forth again and again before any kind of meeting is confirmed, and I’m not even talking about the actual meeting here – that’s going to take another month to actually happen, if at all. Can you relate? I think that if any of those app were more direct about how this app is for Face to Face meets, not a ton of swiping or doing a ton of stuff on the app itself, and then their design would actually follow that premise and did most of that work for us.. well, I think that then THAT would be a very different ballgame.

Right now, with the Village, what I am creating is a screen where as a parent you can see what other playdates are already happening in your neighborhood or will happen soon, maybe right now even or later today, OR you can create your own playdate and post it on the app, because hey, you and your kid will be going to that park anyways, and if one or a few of the other single parents from the app decides to come and join you so that you guys can then chat and get to know each other, and your kids can play.. I think that that is very different from going to a park with your kid and maybe hoping you’ll make a random friend there that you know nothing about at all.. oh, yeah, and then that awkward moment of having to actually approach someone and try to start a conversation, and oh, yeah, the other awkward moment of actually exchanging phone numbers or some other way of connecting.. and, oh, yeah, the other awkward moment of actually meeting again when we’re all so busy these days.. However, with Village you guys can actually keep talking to each other within the app outside of the playdate, and then do another playdate again, because you all do live really close, and now your having real, face to face meetings, and your not wasting your time in making a friend because you’d be taking your kid on a playdate anyways. Win-Win! So many wins!  And, there are many different kids of playdates that you can join or host, not just a plain park playdate.. you can go to a water park or a zoo or an amusement park, etc., etc.

So, the first page of Village is your Top 5 Parent Matches that really match your current life experience, and the subsequent pages are playdate focused because I want to help you make real, actual friends that you hang out and do stuff with, and not just yet another online friend whom you’ve never met in real life. And I want to help both, single moms AND single dads – honestly from talking to a number of single fathers, the stories that they told me, about how there’s a REALLY high suicide rate among single dads (they are 7 times more likely to commit suicide than single moms), and the very, very real struggle, AND since there’s like 20% of single dads to 80% of single moms, single dads have a WAY more difficult time to meet other single dads who understood what their going through and who could be there for them when they’re having a really tough time.. I mean I honestly envision that one day Village could literally save lives and really help single parents have a support system and a community again.

There’s a lot more to say about this, and all of the research that I’ve done that I could discuss, such as how in “Plays Well With Others” book by Erik Barker, he talks about how the ONLY way that we as human species survived into today is because we formed communities and learned to live together, since if, back in the stone age you were like “hey guys, I don’t want to be a part of this village anymore, so I’m gonna go off and live by myself now,” you’d probably be dead within a day when you feel off a cliff and no one came to save you, or a snake bit you, or a million other things…. I’m just saying that we, as a human species, literally EVOLVED by being a part of a community and by having a village, so that need to have a community is literally our biology and a DNA, and it heightens our chances of survival when we do have a village.. and if a single parent does have and feel like they have a strong system, they are way more likely to feel happy, which in turn then really benefits the child/ children that this parent is raising.. and if you feel that someone else cares about you and that you have strong friendships and relationships in your life, aren’t you honestly going to simply feel better and happier and more at ease? I know I would.

Anyways, I wanted to talk about the app called Village that I’ve been working on, and the app is actually nearly done now as far as the design is concerned. However, my main reason for writing this is actually NOT to market the app or even to talk about it – it’s to ask for help. For a time now I’ve been working on this app alone, and I really, really don’t want to any longer. I want to work with others who think that this is something worth creating and investing their time into and that it is worth seeing the light of the day. I think that Village can really, really help our world and really transform our lives, immensely – it has that potential, truly. However, for me personally, I know that it really helps for me to do better and be more accountable and get things done faster when I know that someone else is waiting on me to get it done because they also did something, and maybe we have a once a week meeting to talk about what we did. And, I am honestly NOT looking for someone who knows how to design and develop and code app – if you do, that is great. And if you don’t, that is great too! I am looking for people who will meet with me once a week, maybe, and, especially being single parents could give their thoughts and feedback on how to make this app better and what would fit the ideal user – the single parent – the best. The app will also need a lot of help with marketing and spreading the word and social media stuff and getting people to know about it. I’m honestly just looking for a listening ear, and for a village for the Village, haha . I’m not looking to hire anyone – I can’t. I really have very, very little money myself. I’m just trying to create something that has the potential for a really, really great good, I think. And, if you’d like to join me and be a part of this, I would very much like to talk to you. Thank you!