THE VIEW FROM BELOW

There sure are a lot of ups and downs on the journey. Some of the ups are warm, soft and feel just right in your hand, but sometimes you’re looking at those perky peaks from down below and they seem out of reach. Let’s talk more about boobs- wait not those, I mean the pleasant view I’m working towards. 

The View that Keeps Me Going

The goal with KICK IT is simple – KICK IT with your Homies! But I believe there is a lot of depth to the topic.

There is an opportunity to turn KICK IT into what we’ll call an SRM – Social Relationship Manager. The goal of the SRM is to help people manage their personal relationships with the end result being folks building their relationships, keeping in touch, and getting together with real people to do things together – not just interacting indirectly through a digital format like social media. I believe that a strong social group of friends and family are important pillars in happiness, sense of purpose, and longevity.

I think there is a risk of a bleak future with the advent and ease of use of AI, chronic loneliness, and increased use and availability of “entertaining distractions” like tiktok, instagram, X/Twitter, FB, etc. “Social” platforms like these incentivize people to follow “influencers” and random acquaintances they don’t actually care about or want to spend time with. These platforms can be used for good, but the incentives for them to make money are heavily correlated to promoting distractions and parasocial interactions rather than authentic ones.

The Below – Risk of a Bleak Future with AI / Distracted Society

AI

AI tools are great, and powerful in a lot of amazing ways. I personally have used ChatGPT, OpenAI API, Claude, Cursor and v0 in the last week, and they are a great productivity boost for me. I’m optimistic about the tools in general. However the risk I see is related to interpersonal relationships between humans. Here are some examples: 

• Relationships being just one persons AI communicating with another person’s AI – the AI’s are coming up with the fun, and jokes and the people lose their ability to communicate with each other
• The future of dating / dating apps where people want to say something funny and clever, or attention grabbing to attract a mate. They ask their personal AI to come up with something and use it as a message and send it over. On the other end the person receiving the message does the same thing. If and when they ever meet in person, they haven’t actually interacted, and are effectively still strangers.
• “AI companions” – friends, romantic interests, therapists, entertainers all creating an AI escape that people can be stuck in endlessly. People run on their own personal AI hamster wheel round and round, and never interact with other humans or build authentic relationships.

Society of Distractions

People are just now getting exposed to this, but for the next generation and the baby I’m trying to make it will be universal and they will have never known life without it. I can already feel the shift happening in my own life – my attention span grows shorter with each passing day, I’m easily entertained and distracted by scrolling social media and it stimulates my brain in just the right way to keep me going. I follow influencers, listen to their podcasts and feel like I know their personalities, but it’s only a one way “relationship”. As soon as you’re unplugged from the entertainment and distractions all that’s left is emptiness. You haven’t accomplished anything, you’re not really friends, they are not your social group, you’re just a distracted observer. This leads to lack of fulfillment, loneliness, and depression, where it seems like the only way out is to dive back into the distraction for temporary relief and continue running in place on the hamster wheel, with purpose and fulfillment forever out of reach.

Wow that took a dark turn – really wish you’d just talk about boobs…

Now you probably believe me about the whole “attention span growing shorter every day” thing from before. BOOBIES. There you go, mission accomplished. Moving on – it’s not all doom and gloom! With KICK IT there’s an opportunity to build an SRM platform with a suite of features that help people keep in touch with their core social group and meet new people to bring into it. There are infinite opportunities to instead leverage technology to bring people closer together. I have a list of feature ideas that gets longer every day. But the list is far too long, and I’m not certain which features will have the most impact. 

The Current Mile Marker

I want to build the next major KICK IT feature with the following goals in mind:

• It’s validated with prospective customers that understand they value 
• It provides enough value that it’s something that people would be willing to spend money on to use
• I have a list of people who have signed up and are waiting for it to be released

I believe the following feature could match that criteria: Platform Agnostic Contacting – reach people the way THEY want to be reached. There’s a lot there to build if I go down that road such as: being able to add contacts, being able to group contacts, integrating groups with event creation, several integrations with many contacting platforms, features to make it easy for contacts to add themselves and indicate how they like to be reached.

So before I start the implementation I’m doing a couple things:
1) Setting up ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) interviews with folks who organize events

2) Interviewing them on their events, what’s working, what their pain points are, and any existing tools they use

3) Pitching them the feature to see if it would solve any existing pain points, and if not, do something else

I’ve already done one interview with an event coordinator, and I’m trying to get a few more scheduled. More on that in the future! 

Ta-tas for now!