Picnic Chat.

Co-founder, Chief Product Officer.
Project Overview
The mission of Picnic is to move social media away from the passive consumption of strangers’ content towards conversations with friends. To do this, we built a new social app based on the science of friendship. Picnic is backed by some of the world’s best investors, having raised a $2.5M Seed round from Stride VC, Seedcamp, Scott Belsky and more.
My Contributions
I started this company in 2019 led the Product Strategy and Design until mid 2022. In this time I worked closely in all areas of the business, from business strategy to branding, UX/UI and prototyping. Our main focus was developing a new group chat based social app with unique photo sharing and better memory making features.

Picnic Chat App

Chief Product Officer, Lead Designer
The Picnic app was a massive design and engineering challenge. A social app, based on group chat, is going to be measured with user expectations relative to the incumbent messaging products such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Instagram. The table stakes for achieving this are extremely high. Not only do users expect performant, slick, robust interfaces, they take a large feature set for granted, such as voice messages, video sending, reactions, replies and link previews.

Beyond the expected feature set, we explored and developed many features intended to enhance real friendships. One flagship feature was "Mixes", which was similar to an Instagram Story that you share with your group. The twist was that you could only see your what your friends were up to if you shared yourself.

The other main features were focused around memory making. For this we allowed users to tag messages with a simple swipe, and make pages for those tags, for example #fitness, #doggos.
The Picnic chat interface, showing our unique Mixes feature.
The group memories screen and a tag page.
Screenshots from a Picnic campus party. Our main demographic was university age – historically the best initial target user for successful social apps.
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