We’re back after almost a 3 month hiatus! We were not hiding, we were just heads down into building the next version of the app and we’re super excited to share it with everyone today!

Here’s what’s new in this version:

- WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Emails: The first version of the app had options to keep in touch with people through Call, Text and Facebook. The new version integrates with WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Emails (Yahoo, Gmail and Gmail for Work), giving you more ways to keep in touch with your personal as well as professional connections.

-Settings: We’re also introducing Settings in this version so now you’ll be able to set time preferences for your reminders. In the previous version, these were predefined but now for each service, you can select a one-hour time slot during which you’d like to get your reminders. So you can identify a few slots in the day when you’re usually a little free and use that time to connect with people.

-Support: We’re also adding some basic support tools in the app. This will help you get started and get ongoing support directly from the app.

So there you have it! We’re really happy with the way this version has shaped up. It really allows you to keep in touch with everyone that really matters to you and build lasting relationships both in your personal as well as professional life.

We’d like to thank all our users for sending us their feedback and suggestions for features. It really helped us take the idea forward and bring it to this point. There’s obviously a lot more we can do and we will do, but meanwhile we can’t wait for you to check out this version. If you have any questions, feedback or stories about how you’re keeping in touch with people, please email us. We’d love to hear from you!

Manan

We were at a startup fest in LA and we gave people a simple challenge – Call one person you haven’t talked to in a long time. This young entrepreneur took the challenge and called his mentor who he had not spoken to in ages. Watch what happened.

This has been a pretty crazy week for us. You know how sometimes things happen when you least expect them. It was one of those. So we’ve been in the app store for a couple of months and we were getting some organic traffic everyday but nothing too significant. I was also going to a lot of meetups here in LA trying to get the word out about the app. I was getting pretty good feedback from everyone who saw the app. That was encouraging but I wanted to do be able to tell our story to a bigger audience. Press obviously is the first option that comes to mind. I tried reaching out to a few tech journalists/ bloggers but it was really hard to get their attention. It’s understandable though. They must get tons of requests everyday and it’s impossible for them to look at each and every app that is sent to them. So that approach wasn’t working out. We even considered hiring a PR firm but after talking to a few people we realized that PR was not going to be effective, atleast in the initial stage. We had to build some organic growth.

This week, I just casually submitted the app on Product Hunt. It’s basically a platform that features new tech products every day. The way it works is, new products are submitted to them every day. They handpick the products and feature them on their home page and then their community upvotes the products they like and the best products get surfaced every day. They also send out their daily newsletter with the top 5 products from the previous day. I had signed up for their newsletter when they were still pretty new and being a product person myself it was good to constantly see all the cool stuff people are building. So yeah I submitted the app to them on Tuesday. I honestly wasn’t expecting anything. But I woke up the next day and I had an email in my inbox from Nichole (their community manager) saying you’re trending on Product Hunt so go jump into the comments. I was like what!?? And then things just got crazy! We started getting upvotes and comments from the founders and CEOs of some famous startups, product managers at some top product companies like Apple and Nike, designers, developers and some other tech influencers. These are people who build amazing products that we use every day. So their feedback really mattered.

We were trending at #1 all day on Wednesday Oct 15th and got featured as the top app in their newsletter the next day. I didn’t realize what that would mean until we looked at our numbers. In the first 2 days alone we got more than:
- 13k hits on our website
- 2k app downloads
- 6k views on Vimeo
- A ton of emails with feedback, suggestions for features and requests for the Android app.

We could not have asked for a better opening. I can’t thank Ryan Hoover and his team at Product Hunt enough. I think they have done an amazing job of building a solid community of tastemakers who help surface new products everyday. It really helps founders like myself to get our products in front of the right audience.

I just got my daily inspirational quote and it couldn’t be more fitting.

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” ― William Arthur Ward

Thank you Product Hunt!

Manan
Founder, Bond

It’s been a couple of months since I’ve been using the app and I feel like I’m getting better at keeping in touch with people. Not just in terms of calling them more often but I feel like it has made me a little more caring towards them. Earlier, I would reach out to people only when I was bored or when I needed something from them but now I call/ message them just to check in and see how they are doing. The conversations feel much more relaxed and genuine. If you think about it, when you call someone with no expectations but simply out of love and care for them, there is no pressure on either side. It helps you both open up more and have deeper conversations.

People usually have a lot going on in their lives. Everyone goes through their ups and downs. There have been times when I’ve called friends and found out that they had been feeling really low or stressed about something. These are things people don’t usually post on Facebook or Twitter. If I didn’t check in, I would have never known what they’re going through. I’m just glad I could be there to support them when they really needed it.

We often think about doing big things in terms of changing the world and helping those in need through charity and stuff, and I think we should still do all of that but sometimes we forget about little things we can do for people around us. Just be there for them. It’s one of the smallest big things you can do.

Manan
Founder, Bond

That’s my grandma. She passed away today at 85. I lived with her for the first 15 years of my life so I was really close to her growing up. I was quite a trouble maker as a kid and often got yelled at but she would always protect me and comfort me. She loved me unconditionally. As I got older, life happened, situations changed and my priorities changed too. My friends, my girlfriends, my career became more important. I started spending less and less time with her. I got to a point where I would see her just once a year on my annual trip to India. Last year, I was in India and I went to see her only on my last day there. She wasn’t keeping too well. She was complaining about how I never call her but she was like, it’s ok! I understand you must be busy. I felt terrible because I was really not that busy. As she was lying in her bed, I gave her a little kiss on her forehead, held her hand and I told her I’d start calling her more often.

A year passed by and I had not called her even once! But meanwhile, I had started working on Bond. She was the first person I wanted to start keeping in touch with and I was really looking forward to it. I was in India last month and I went to see her again. She was really suffering this time. She couldn’t eat, she wouldn’t talk to anyone and she had gotten really weak. It was really sad to see her like that. Couple of weeks later, our app was ready and I had setup reminders to call her every week. But now, she was so weak that she couldn’t even talk on the phone. I was too late! Today she passed and I wish I could just tell her how I really meant to call her more often.

Manan

You have three different ways to Bond with people right now. You can either call them, text them or send them a Facebook message. The best way to get started is to start keeping in touch with people that you’re really close to. Your family and your close friends.

You should already have these people in your phone contacts. In the app, if you go to the Phone Call option and give the app access to your phone contacts, you will see all your phone contacts listed. Go through the list and select all the contacts you want to keep in touch with. Once done, hit the Schedule option and set the schedule for how often you’d like to be reminded to call each one of them. You know your schedule and if you know when the other person is usually available to talk you can customize your reminders accordingly.

This would be a good start but you may also have contacts on your phone that you don’t call that often but rather just text. If you want to start keeping in touch with them too, you can go to the Text Message option and select those people and again, for each contact select how often you’d like to text them.

Now, if you’re really motivated, you may want to get back in touch with everyone you like and care about. Although, you may realize that some of them are not on your phone contacts but you have them on your Facebook! In that case, go to the Facebook option and select those people and setup reminders to send them Facebook messages to keep in touch with them.

It’s that easy!

Get Bond from the App Store

If you have any questions check out the FAQs on our Support page or you can email us at support@getbond.co

It was my 30th birthday. Looking back at the last 30 years of my life, I felt nothing but thankful for all the people that I had met and all the interactions and experiences I shared with them. What I realized though, is that I was no longer in touch with a lot of them just because we don’t go to the same school or college any more, live in the same city or work at the same company any more. These were all the people that I was really close to at one point and then situations changed, we went in different directions and got so consumed in our new lives that we just completely lost touch.

I decided to change that. I tried setting up reminders on my phone for every person I wanted to keep in touch with but it was really tedious and wasn’t effective at all. I started looking for other apps that could help me do this better but I couldn’t find anything. I mean yeah there’s already Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and all the new social networking apps that come out every day but I couldn’t find anything that would regularly remind me to keep in touch with people I choose to.

As I started talking to more people about it, I realized it wasn’t just me. It was definitely a problem others were facing too. So I put together a small team and we decided to fix it. The result is Bond. Our only goal is to make it really easy for all of us to keep in touch with people that matter to us. We’ve taken the first crack at it and we’re quite excited to share the first version of the app with you.

Get Bond from the App Store

Have fun bonding with people and keep in touch!

Manan
Founder, Bond