Ah, Foursquare was so much fun. Definitely inspired this, except this is a little more private -- only your explicitly-added friends get to see your hollers.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what a "public" feed might look like and ultimately decided that my goal wasn't to make a social media app, but to specifically hang out with my friends in person. There's also a locality angle to this, where if you live in LA, you won't add a friend in Montana to your group, because they could never attend your events. So it becomes hyper-local by default.

Group chats, I think, are a fantastic medium for directed messaging (you have to explicitly choose the friends that you're group texting), and if that's something you like, then there's no reason to use Holler. This app, on the other hand, is about undirected messaging, where you simply broadcast your activity. The friction of choosing the group text and possibly excluding someone or accidentally including someone you didn't mean to goes away.

It does introduce other problems, to be fair, but I think it's a trade-off that I'm happy to make.

Yeah - in Hamburg I had a bunch of tech people checking in everywhere they went.

I miss these times.

For our sauna group, this app might work well. trying it out now. So far, couldn’t find flaws except the Apple login not pre-filling my name.

Thank you for trying! Sadly for ease of use but excellently for privacy reasons, Apple isn't very nice about giving names. It's just something we have to work around.