The Story of Foxie

The Story of Foxie

The average adult spends 7 hours a week on social networks. Problems like anxiety and isolation are common as millions of people are glued to their screens. Social networks help you connect with friends and discover people who share similar interests. However, the problem in moving your online connections (beyond your friends) to the real world remains unsolved.

When I moved from Orlando to Miami, I was looking for people to play soccer with. I needed a tool that would help me find out people nearby who played soccer and also know when and where.

I tried what was out there. Meetup, EventBrite, FB Groups. None seemed to solve this issue. Post an event quickly and see who could join. Or see what was going on around me.

So I thought , let’s make an app that solves all these issues and more.

‘“As the idea progressed, I realized that this can be for anything really. Not just for soccer, but for meeting others in real life with shared interests and activities.”

I wanted to build a platform that would help me discover people who share my interests and connect with them in real life through activities or spontaneous outings. Been new to a city and to college can also be made simpler. Hiring a team was too expensive and finding a co-founder with technical expertise yielded no results. Thus, I took it upon himself to learn Swift (Apple’s programming language for iOS devices). Armed with coding know-how that I acquired in 3 months, I set out building a new kind of social network. Foxie is my full-time project; On most days, I code during the day and handle business and makes plans for growth during the night. I found validation for his idea through online communities on Slack and mainly at a tech conference, where people showed a lot of interest in Foxie. Even now that we’re in public Beta, people really like it.

“Soon I’ll start promoting it and being around college campuses. Why college campuses? Foxie needs communities like schools to grow organically and for people to trust it and see the value in it.”

The beta is available on Testflight

“I have a long term vision for Foxie that this will usher a much needed change in the zeitgeist when it comes to how we use technology to connect with others beyond our circle of friends and family. Specially how other companies are thinking of making social networks in Virtual Reality further isolating us even more”

Check out Foxie

The Story of Foxie 🦊 was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.