Explains founder Jon Cook, “It’s a way for guys at Harvard to meet girls at Yale, etc. And it’s not intrusive. HowRandom has a very solid viral loop. It has the Facebook-like .edu exclusivity. And it’s extremely simple to use.”
Cook and co-founder Jason Humphries think of HowRandom as more of a social experiment than a business. They hope it will mirror the randomness of life and “foster real-world meetings and interactions between two people that might otherwise never meet. ” Like a text-based Chatroulette with no penis problem, there’s also a next feature in case you don’t like who you’re chatting with.
Cook says he wants to keep evolving the app through user feedback, and is considering including limited profile option along with the “Verified” logo.
Facebook initially restricted its users to college students with .edu addresses and that element was crucial to its success, this is also HowRandom’s hook. Colleges are hotbeds of virality in more ways than one, and starting off there is a good move for any social app.
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Authors: Alexia Tsotsis