After releasing CouchTimes in 2023, the first iOS app I built from scratch, I have spent the past few months working on my second app, which I plan to release later this year.
The app is called Friendzone, and it's your personal companion for managing and organizing your relationships with friends and family. The core aim of Friendzone is to help you become a more thoughtful friend, ultimately fostering deeper, longer-lasting, and healthier relationships.
In short, Friendzone is your personal CRM.
Why Friendzone?
I started building Friendzone primarily for myself. Many of my friends, colleagues, and people I want to stay in touch with don’t live in the same city as I do. Sometimes they are in different cities in Germany, other countries in Europe, or even on different continents.
Maintaining these relationships requires effort and practice. When everyone is busy with their lives, keeping in touch with friends you don’t see regularly can easily fall by the wayside.
For me, nurturing these relationships means connecting over FaceTime a few times a year or, even better, meeting in person. It also involves simply being there and catching up through text, showing genuine interest in their lives. Often, it’s the small gestures, like sending a message on the first day of a new job, that go a long way in nurturing these relationships.
In the past, I used various systems and apps to manage this. I relied on my calendar for birthdays, anniversaries, and other events, Obsidian for notes about people and Things to remind me to catch up with someone. However, all this information was scattered across different platforms, leading to a disconnected and frustrating user experience for myself.
Friendzone aims to address these issues by serving as a unified platform for all information related to your personal relationships. It will store everything you want to remember about your friends, including contact information, birthdays, anniversaries, life events, gift ideas, and general notes.
With this powerful collection, it’s up to you to step up and become a more thoughtful friend, nurturing and growing your real-life relationships.
I envision a future where Friendzone is a tool that helps you become that person. Friendzone is designed to be a purpose- and principle-driven software that supports you in managing your relationships while keeping all your data privacy-focused on your device and only synced with your own iCloud.
Join the waitlist
While Friendzone is not ready for an official release yet, a few friends and I have been using it for over two months.
I will begin inviting more people to TestFlight over the next few weeks. Please visit the Friendzone landing page and join the waitlist to receive an invite soon.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out anytime on Mastodon or via email.