Connect with us

APPS

Paired pulls in $3.6M to encourage more couples to get cosy with app-based relationship care

Published

on

paired pulls in 3 6m to encourage more couples to get cosy with app based relationship care
Paired couples app 1

Can an app improve your romantic relationships? The founders behind Paired, a “relationship care” app for couples, believe it can. And since launching in October, with $1M to kick things off, they’ve convinced 5,000+ coupled-up others to try their custom blend of partner quizzes, “relationship satisfaction” tracking, and audio tips from experts — to try to feel closer to their S.O.

Paired is now gunning for serious growth: It’s announcing $3.6M in seed funding today, led by Eka Ventures with participation from existing investors including Taavet Hinrikus (Wise, formerly TransferWise), Harold Primat (investor and former professional racing driver), and the co-founders of Runtastic.

As part of the seed funding, Camilla Dolan of Eka Ventures will join the board alongside the app’s co-founders Kevin Shanahan and Diego López (who previously worked together at language learning app Memrise).

Paired says its goal for the new funding is to grow its user-base from 5,000+ to 100k over the next 18 months.

All sorts of audio-led wellness ‘self-care’ apps have been bubbling up in recent years — offering individuals app-wrapped help with stuff like meditation and mindfulness; targeted motivation to combat anxiety and stress; or dishing up sex tips and sexual self awareness.

Paired fits within that broader trend, albeit with a more explicit nudge to extend the self-care phenomenon to a unit of two romantically connected people.

As it looks for growth, the UK-based startup says it will continue to target the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, which are its main markets at this point. “We expect the growth to continue to come from here over the next 12 months,” says Shanahan.

“We’re building out our product team — hiring engineers, a product manager, a data scientist — to begin offering more varied and personalised relationship conversations for our users,” he goes on.

“Personalisation is a particular focus as every relationship is different and the app will begin to understand what your interests are, what stage you’re in, what would be most useful for you to discuss, etc. We’re also growing our content, working with new experts to cover more relationship topics and marketing the app via influencers, partnerships, and other channels.”

Who are Paired’s early adopters? Currently, the average user is a straight, early 30s Millennial who’s been in their current relationship for two-three years, according to Shanahan. (He says around 5% of users are LGBTQ+.)

But he also claims Paired has a wide mix of users, adding: “We have couples who have been together for 6 months and those who have been together for 10+ years, so it’s a wide spectrum.”

He says the split of women and men using the app is “fairly even” but avoids specifying exactly how usage splits on gender lines.

The app can be used by only one half of a couple — for solo relationship support/self-care, if preferred — but users have the option to pair with their partner to swap answers to relationship questions in order to encourage discussion. And that’s where Paired can offer the most personalized experience to users, by opening up a dedicated ‘relationship’ discussion channel between the couple. (Paired does not obviously cater to open/polyamorous couples — but presumably could be used as a discussion tool for the primary partners.)

The idea isn’t to replace couples therapy, per Shanahan. Rather Paired wants to create a whole new intermediating layer — based on the notion that communication problems in a relationship can be tackled earlier (and more easily) if you stick a piece of software between you which nudges both halves of the relationship to notice and address potential disconnect.

“If couples therapy is a dentist for your relationship, then we would be a toothbrush,” is how Shanahan puts it when asked if the idea is to replace couples therapy.

“Like a toothbrush is not a substitute for the dentist, we aren’t trying to replace couples therapy. Our goal is to promote healthy relationship behaviours between couples and believe our audience will eventually grow to become the majority of couples,” he suggests.

He points to a study Paired commissioned from the Open University and University of Brighton — which he says showed that couples who used the app over the course of three months saw on average a 36% increase in their “relationship satisfaction”. (Albeit quantifying such a subjective measure as a percentile increase may not appeal to every romantic person’s tastes.)

Shanahan says Paired wants to offer ongoing support, too — rather than (the opposite scenario) of its users arriving at such a point of mutual understanding they could feel they don’t never need to take another partner quiz to understand what their life partner is thinking/feeling.

Its philosophy is, no matter how thoughtful you get vis-a-vis your S.O., there’s always more to learn and thus you always need to keep working on ‘relationship care’. It is of course a very convenient philosophy for a subscription app.

“You probably wouldn’t say success when you’re fit is to stop going to the gym,” says Shanahan. “Or when your teeth are healthy to stop brushing your teeth. Similarly we want Paired to be a tool to help keep your relationship in a good place, so success for us is keeping your relationship satisfaction high over time.”

So what have the founders learned about their own relationships from using Paired?

Shanahan confirms that he and his partner have been using the app “a ton (and not just for testing)”, adding: “I’ve personally learnt that there is always more to discover about your partner and it’s a fun journey. Also that discussing issues when they are small is useful so they don’t become big later down the line.”

Diego López, Paired’s other co-founder and CTO, tells us that the daily questions posed by the app have “helped my partner and I fight lockdown monotony”. “There’s been many occasions where we give the same answer to a question. It’s a great feeling to know that we understand each other and a reminder of the things we have in common,” he adds.

Commenting on Paired’s seed round in a statement, Camilla Dolan from Eka Ventures, said: “Despite relationship health being such an important and truly global part of our lives there is not currently an accessible and affordable way of supporting it — Paired has set out to change that.

“We love Kevin & Diego’s vision to bring happiness and health to relationships and be the global category leader for relationship management. What really got us excited though was the Paired user stories and the level of change that Paired is already having on their early users.”

In another supporting statement, existing investor Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, added: “Kevin and the Paired team have a vision for improving the relationships of hundreds of millions of couples. Building and strengthening relationships is something we all need help with from time to time, but lots of people feel unsure of where to turn for help. The rapid uptake from paid subscribers since their October launch makes me confident that it can become the global, digital platform for relationships.”

Paired’s app (available on iOS and Google Play) is free to download — but a monthly or yearly subscription is required to access the full range of content and support.

TechCrunch

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

APPS

Best ASO Tips To Boost Your App Search In 2022

Published

on

App Store Optimization Image fc2b1cab

You need your application to be really effective in the overpopulated application market. Then, at that point, you will have to drive downloads to endure. So when it’s all said and done, you must account for yourself. Get your application the consideration it merits.

The uplifting news, however, is that customers love to download applications – last year, we downloaded in excess of 200 billion applications around the world, and that figure is set to increment to 258 billion every year by 2022 as cell phone reception increments.

Assuming you need to be seen and have your application downloaded by however many clients as could reasonably be expected, then, at that point, you should begin by taking a gander at the application store.

Underneath, we’ve assembled probably the best application store improvement methods to assist you with creating more downloads in 2021 and then some…

Start with Your Application Name 

The odds are you as of now have an extraordinary name for your application, yet an appropriately advanced application is about significantly more than marking.

Assuming you need to amplify transparency and guarantee you’re showing up when clients look for applications like yours, you ought to remember the primary keywords for your application name or title, comparable to how you’d make a title label while improving a site page.

You could begin with your application name so it tends to be plainly recognized, thus it appears on the home screen of gadgets.

Then, at that point, you can add a scramble or vertical bar prior to adding a few pertinent watchwords to your speciality, or even put your application name in quotes as we did with FORE Business Golf Networking.

Urge Users to Leave Reviews 

You could ask for reviews by clients through the means of your site, or through an in-application notice toward the finish of their meeting, yet make sure to restrict the number of pop-ups you execute with the goal that you don’t disturb or disappoint your clients, as this could urge them to erase your application.

We’d support all application engineers and entrepreneurs to react to criticism on their applications, as this can further develop client relations and resolve issues in an open arena.

Zero in on Your Application Depiction 

Your application depiction is your principle assemblage of text your landing page content, in a manner of speaking. Utilize a site like KeywordTool.io to discover information on your picked catchphrases to expand your openness. As portrayals are shortened, ensure you remember the main data for the initial three lines of your depiction, and afterwards add things like social confirmation, emoticon, and suggestions to take action to build commitment and downloads.

Incorporate Appealings Screen Captures 

Pictures and recordings won’t help your application rank, yet they will expand changes and assist clients with working out whether it’s an application they truly need.

There’s a little guide in empowering clients toward downloading your application if in any case, they’re not going to interface with it, or download and leave a negative survey when they understand it wasn’t what was promoted.

Assuming you need to ‘tart up’ your item page, then, at that point, you can add marking and extra text and data and designs to your recordings and screen capture, yet they ought not to diminish your item.

Pay for App Store or Play Store 

As we have SEO and pay-per-click, you need to work one next to the other (one is a gradual methodology with long haul benefits – the other is a speedy success yet requires an endless spending plan), application store promotions can be utilized to get the message out with regards to your new programming and assist you with positioning at the highest point of query items pages – in front of your opposition and enormous names in the application world.

Keep in mind, you’ll need to focus on the right crowd and art an advertisement that will assist you with changing over and that since you’re paying for situations, that doesn’t mean clients will download or cooperate with your application.

Wrapping Up!

You can employ a group of  App  Store Optimization Services suppliers to benefit a scope of application store improvement administrations, including watchword advancement, resource enhancement, and restriction to guarantee your application is seen by individuals that matter.

We have long periods of involvement in creating and showcasing applications and have assisted different customers with expanding their downloads by infiltrating rewarding and regularly undiscovered business sectors.

Author:
Prachi Gupta likes to write information about Digital Marketing Trends that can help audience to grow their business.

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

APPS

WhatsApp will finally let users encrypt their chat backups in the cloud

Published

on

whatsapp will finally let users encrypt their chat backups in the cloud

WhatsApp said on Friday it will give its two billion users the option to encrypt their chat backups to the cloud, taking a significant step to put a lid on one of the tricky ways private communication between individuals on the app can be compromised.

The Facebook-owned service has end-to-end encrypted chats between users for more than a decade. But users have had no option but to store their chat backup to their cloud — iCloud on iPhones and Google Drive on Android — in an unencrypted format.

Tapping these unencrypted WhatsApp chat backups on Google and Apple servers is one of the widely known ways law enforcement agencies across the globe have for years been able to access WhatsApp chats of suspect individuals.

Now WhatsApp says it is patching this weak link in the system.

“WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups, and getting there was a really hard technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage across operating systems,” said Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a post announcing the new feature.

Store your own encryption keys

The company said it has devised a system to enable WhatsApp users on Android and iOS to lock their chat backups with encryption keys. WhatsApp says it will offer users two ways to encrypt their cloud backups, and the feature is optional.

In the “coming weeks,” users on WhatsApp will see an option to generate a 64-digit encryption key to lock their chat backups in the cloud. Users can store the encryption key offline or in a password manager of their choice, or they can create a password that backs up their encryption key in a cloud-based “backup key vault” that WhatsApp has developed. The cloud-stored encryption key can’t be used without the user’s password, which isn’t known by WhatsApp.

whatsapp e2ee backup

Image Credits: WhatsApp/supplied

“We know that some will prefer the 64-digit encryption key whereas others want something they can easily remember, so we will be including both options. Once a user sets their backup password, it is not known to us. They can reset it on their original device if they forget it,” WhatsApp said.

“For the 64-digit key, we will notify users multiple times when they sign up for end-to-end encrypted backups that if they lose their 64-digit key, we will not be able to restore their backup and that they should write it down. Before the setup is complete, we’ll ask users to affirm that they’ve saved their password or 64-digit encryption key.”

A WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch that once an encrypted backup is created, previous copies of the backup will be deleted. “This will happen automatically and there is no action that a user will need to take,” the spokesperson added.

Potential regulatory pushback?

The move to introduce this added layer of privacy is significant and one that could have far-reaching implications.

End-to-end encryption remains a thorny topic of discussion as governments continue to lobby for backdoors. Apple was reportedly pressured to not add encryption to iCloud Backups after the FBI complained, and while Google has offered users the ability to encrypt their data stored in Google Drive, the company allegedly didn’t tell governments before it rolled out the feature.

When asked by TechCrunch whether WhatsApp, or its parent firm Facebook, had consulted with government bodies — or if it had received their support — during the development process of this feature, the company declined to discuss any such conversations.

“People’s messages are deeply personal and as we live more of our lives online, we believe companies should enhance the security they provide their users. By releasing this feature, we are providing our users with the option to add this additional layer of security for their backups if they’d like to, and we’re excited to give our users a meaningful advancement in the safety of their personal messages,” the company told TechCrunch.

WhatsApp also confirmed that it will be rolling out this optional feature in every market where its app is operational. It’s not uncommon for companies to withhold privacy features for legal and regulatory reasons. Apple’s upcoming encrypted browsing feature, for instance, won’t be made available to users in certain authoritarian regimes, such as China, Belarus, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines.

At any rate, Friday’s announcement comes days after ProPublica reported that private end-to-end encrypted conversations between two users can be read by human contractors when messages are reported by users.

“Making backups fully encrypted is really hard and it’s particularly hard to make it reliable and simple enough for people to use. No other messaging service at this scale has done this and provided this level of security for people’s messages,” Uzma Barlaskar, product lead for privacy at WhatsApp, told TechCrunch.

“We’ve been working on this problem for many years, and to build this, we had to develop an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage that can be used across the world’s largest operating systems and that took time.”

TechCrunch

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

APPS

Dispo launches a test to gauge user interest in selling their photos as NFTs

Published

on

dispo launches a test to gauge user interest in selling their photos as nfts

Dispo, the photo-sharing app that emulates disposable cameras, started rolling out a test yesterday that will record user interest in selling photos as NFTs. Some users will now see a sell button on their photos, and when they tap it, they can sign up to be notified when the ability to sell Dispo photos launches.

CEO and co-founder Daniel Liss told TechCrunch that Dispo is still deciding how it will incorporate NFT sales into the app, which is why the platform is piloting a test with its users. Dispo doesn’t know yet what blockchain it would use, if it would partner with an NFT marketplace or what cut of sales Dispo would take.

“I think it’s safe to say from the test that there will be an experience native to the Dispo app,” Liss said. “There are a number of ways it could look — there could be a native experience within Dispo that then connects through an API to another platform, and in turn, they’re our partner, but to the community, it would look native to the Dispo app.”

Dispo NFT 02

Image Credits: Dispo

This marks a new direction for the social media app, which seeks to redefine the photo-sharing experience by only letting users see the photos they took at 9 AM the next morning. From Dispo’s perspective, this gimmick helps users share more authentically, since you take one photo and then you’re done — the app isn’t conducive to taking dozens of selfies and posting the “best” image of yourself. But though it only launched in December 2019, Dispo has already faced both buzzy hype and devastating controversy.

Until about a year ago, the app was called David’s Disposables, named after co-founder and YouTuber David Dobrik. The app was downloaded over a million times in the first week after its release and hit No. 1 on the App Store charts. In March 2021, the app dropped its waitlist and relaunched with social network features, but just weeks later, Insider reported sexual assault allegations against a member of Vlog Squad, Dobrik’s YouTube prank ensemble. In response, Spark Capital severed ties with the company, leading to Dobrik’s departure. Other investors like Seven Seven Six and Unshackled Ventures, which contributed to the company’s $20 million Series A round, announced that they would donate any profits from their investments in Dispo to organizations working with survivors of sexual assault.

Liss told TechCrunch in June, when the company confirmed its Series A, that Dobrik’s role with the company was as a marketing partner — Liss has been CEO since the beginning. In light of the controversy, Liss said the app focused on improving the product itself and took a step back from promotion.

According to data from the app analytics firm SensorTower, Dispo has reached an estimated 4.7 million global installs to date since launch. Though the app saw the most downloads in January 2020, when it was installed over 1 million times, the app’s next best month came in March 2021, when it removed its waitlist — that month, about 616,000 people downloaded Dispo. Between March and the end of August, the app was downloaded around 1.4 million times, which is up 118% year over year compared to the same time frame in 2020 — but it should be expected that this year’s numbers would be higher, since last year, the app’s membership was exclusive.

dispo

Image Credits: Dispo

Now, with the announcement that Dispo is pursuing NFTs, Liss hopes that his company won’t just change how people post photos, but what the relationship will be between platforms and the content that users create.

“Why NFTs? The most powerful memories of our lives have value. And they have economic value, because we created them, and the past of social media fails to recognize that,” Liss told TechCrunch. “As a result, the only way that a creator with a big following is compensated is by selling directly to a brand, as opposed to profiting from the content itself.”

Adding NFT sales to the app offers Dispo a way to profit from a cut of user sales, but it stands to question how adding NFT sales could impact the community-focused feel of Dispo.

“I think there is tremendous curiosity and interest,” Liss said. “But these problems and questions are why we need more data.”

TechCrunch

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending