We like to create an environment where people can express themselves, through media, and they can feel good about that. They want to have freedom in what they post but they don’t want to feel shamed. I definitely think that teens are savvy, and I think they’re tired of the perfect kind of content that’s required on other social platforms. YP: How important is positivity/inclusivity in social platforms, and Wishbone’s ethos? Sometimes they’re expressing that identity through the cards they’re creating on Wishbone. They’re thinking about their preferences, they’re thinking about their identity. So they generally feel good.Īlso, these users are at a transformative point in their lives. People on Wishbone are super-active so they vote on a lot of things, and they’re excited about that voting, and to see how people vote on their content. The content you’re putting up is probably two of your favorite things, and you want to know what other people think, it doesn’t reflect a negative component of you. So unlike a lot of the angst that a teen might go through when publishing an Instagram photo-whether it gets enough likes, or shares-with Wishbone you don’t have that angst. YP: Why do you think that the app is seeing success with young consumers? We definitely have a male audience as well, but a lot of the content is coming from our female users. She uses Snapchat, Instagram.She’s bored on her phone, wants more to do on her phone, wants to talk about her favorite things, and she’s developed content on Wishbone to express those favorite things. MJ: Our target user is probably a 14-21-year-old girl who lives on her phone. Then we select some every day to feature to the whole community. Hundreds of thousands of cards a day are created, which people publish to their friends within Wishbone. Content is created through the community. So Wishbone was born, and we have a lot of teens now who use it every day, posting their preferences and posting their favorite things, from celebrities, media, television, movies, and music. It’s saying, “Here’s two really neat things, what do people think about these two things?” We really guided into the thesis that the app wasn’t going to be focused on personal stuff, what dress you’re wearing or makeup you have on, but around pop culture preferences. It wasn’t about someone being cool or not cool, it’s not about someone saying your photo is liked, or not liked. Wishbone’s concept is allowing people to put up their pop culture choices-brands they love, or bands, or musicians, places they want to go-they could express themselves through these choices, and other users could select one or the other. One of our first apps, and lucky for us one of the most successful ones, was Wishbone. Being that I had a history at Myspace, I knew a lot about social media, and we started experimenting with stuff that we thought was interesting to teens. For us, it wasn’t about thinking, “What do you do in the wake of cord-cutting?” it was, “What do you do when people don’t own TVs, and all they do is consume entertainment on phones?” We started thinking a lot about teens, how teens use phones, and how teens entertain themselves on phones. Then I started Science, where we work with early stage entrepreneurs on ideas and sometimes build some of our own ideas.Ībout a year ago we started building concepts specifically targeting entertainment needs within teens, and our thought was that there is this massive change in entertainment. Mike Jones: I’ve been working in pop culture for a long time-I started a magazine in college that was focused on the interest of teens and young adults, I started a startup after that that I eventually sold to AOL, I became an active angel investor, and then I took over Myspace when Myspace was fighting the Facebook battle. Ypulse: Tell us about Wishbone’s user base and how the app started. We talked to Mike Jones, the founder of venture studio Science, the company behind Wishbone, and former CEO of Myspace, about why the app is appealing to teens, how things have changed in social media in the last ten years, and how brands can engage with the app’s active young users. Since May of 2015, they have drawn in over three million mostly-teen users who post hundred of thousands of simple, two-choice polls-or cards-a day. Wishbone, which was featured in the New York Times earlier this month, is a social networking app that lets users easily poll their friends about pop culture preferences. The app market is more competitive than ever, so when one platform manages to build a following of millions of young users in a matter of months, it gets attention. We talked to one of the minds behind wildly popular polling app Wishbone to find out why millions of teens are posting hundreds of thousands of pieces of content there daily.
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