Better Questions ➟ Better Answers ➟ Better Friendships ➟ Better Life
folsom product update #2: adding more questions to create more inspiration
I’ll start:
Who was your first crush?
What posters did you have on the wall of your childhood bedroom?
What was the best date you’ve been on?
What are you most proud of?
What does a day in your dream life look like? Where are you, who are you with, what are you doing?
Interesting questions create inspiring conversations and are asked by the most compelling conversationalists. They stick in the head for a long time, I still remember my favorite interview question during my Palantir interview in April 20171. And months ago, someone asked me to describe my childhood in 3 sentences. It was 4am in a NYC hookah bar and I’m not sure if he remembers the asking, but I’ll fondly recall that moment for a long long time.
Loving questions isn’t a hot take, Social Media 2.0 ran on asking specific questions for years.
Facebook statuses asked “what’s on your mind?”
Twitter asked “what are you doing?”
These companies were shaped by their founding questions — Twitter’s question led to it becoming the news app du jour. Facebook’s led to its cultural demise, creating a weird stew of toxic opinions.
(Note — Twitter now asks “What is happening?!”, which is kind of terrifying and anxiety-inducing)
Social media 3.0 skipped the question because they assume you understand the assignment. Instagram and TikTok don’t explicitly prompt you, but instead expect the nudges of other people’s posts will be sufficient. Understanding that nudge requires dedicated viewership which requires hours in-app, a price more people are acknowledging.
We think Social Technology 4.0 will bring the questions back, but with a twist. You should get agency in what you answer and in what you ask. Getting to answer great questions make you feel seen, valued, and understood. And it’s more important that you feel those emotions towards other humans, not towards an app that’s responsible for the asking.
Why questions matter and where they’re asked today
Alex likes to say that “meaningful connection is the product of a willingness to be vulnerable matched with an ability to ask the right question.”
People realize this and crave better questions. There’s a whole tiktok genre of how to create better connection through better questions.2
And we all know what answering bad questions feel like. Remember getting home from school and your parents asking “how was your day?” and you said “good” and that was the whole conversation? Then everyone’s frustrated and the conversation has stalled.
The intent was there, the questions were not.
A rash of card games have taken off around this premise. We’re Not Really Strangers has 5.4 million followers on IG, and i’m seeing more pop up all the time (Delve Deck, Unpack That).
We want to tap into that awesome question energy using the power of your phone, and make it easier to ask and answer about what matters. And we want to create a repository for your answers. A scratchpad for the next great American novel which is about you, your lore, your superhero origin story, and the subsequent deeds and exploits as you create your life day by day facing little obstacles and winning little battles.
We started with “how are you feeling?” because we have so much conviction in vulnerability creating deep connections.
But there are other types of vulnerability. Even being willing to ask a question, especially a new or personal questions, requires being vulnerable.
Hopefully we can make that asking even easier.
Our first step in this direction:
Here are some questions for you: Do you know your personal lore? The magic that makes you you? Do you have it saved anywhere? Do you know your friends’?
Our V0 lets you cycle through a few different prompts if you’re not feeling “how are you feeling?” giving you and your confidants’ a different angle of your life.
And this is what an answered question looks like in the feed.
What’s next
Ask us what we have planned next in the space— we’re excited about it!
What are your favorite questions?
What questions do you remember being asked by others?
What do you wish you knew about your friends but don’t?
How would you like these questions to be asked, and how would you like to see answers visualized?
What should we even call it? Questions? Prompts? Opportunities? Stories? (i think the story of your first date is a much better ‘story’ than Instagram’s version of Stories, but i’m biased)
As always, all questions (or any other shape of comment) cherished. Thank you for reading! <3
Your closing memes:
If you’re curious the question was “if your life were a trilogy, what would be the three parts? And describe the transition points between each of them”
A few of these tiktok vids below, there are soooo many
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