Show HN: Millow – Stay connected with your inner circle

For the ultra-private, we've made it possible for you to add people without actually sharing access to your contact list — just choose the 'add manually' option when adding a friend, and enter anything you want for their name/phone number. The app will still work as a single-player option.

There's only one feature you'll miss in this case. You just won't be able to share availability with someone unless they log in with the same phone number as what you've got stored in your contacts. This is to ensure that only friends you add are able to see your availability.

First, we will never use your personal information for advertising. We want to be a personal productivity app, and not a social network.

On the specifics of your question, there are two ways to use the app:

1) Single-player mode: you add a contact (either imported from your contact list, or typed in manually by you) and set reminders for when to meet, and log when you do

(You could do this via manually adding contacts and be sure that none of your social graph / personal information is put out there at all, other than your phone number for account verification)

2) Multi-player mode: share your availability with your inner circle. You need to use real phone numbers for this, so we can verify your friends if/when they join (note: we won't contact them to join, that's on you) so we ensure we're only sharing your availability info with verified friends you've added.

I hope that helps!

Great question! Prior to Millow, I built Screenhero, which was then acquired by Slack (my team and I built Slack voice/video/screen sharing). Working at Slack was a great experience, and I love the company and the product (and use it with all my current projects, I have 14 Slack workspaces in my sidebar!).

Why is this relevant to your question? For two reasons:

1) Financially, we (we're a husband & wife team) have a very long runway. We own 100% of the company, and have no plans to take on venture capital. Our financial situation means we're also under no pressure to monetize, and we are doing what we're doing because we believe in the mission of our company and product. We want to have stronger connections to our friends and family, and we want that for society at large. Of the 10,000 other things we could have chosen to do, we chose this, because we believe it is the most important thing for us to do.

2) Acquisition is neither a goal nor an option for us. We want to stay independent, build what we want to build, with our users being our only North Star. If Facebook did acquire us, we would a) no longer be independent, b) no longer own the destiny of our product, c) be slightly more financially well off, but (c) is not worth (a) and (b) to us. After a certain point, money ceases to add value to one's life — it's in the study we quoted in our "learn more" section! We're building Millow because we believe in the mission, not because we wanted to make $$$ (if we did, I'd have done another SaaS B2B company like Screenhero).

Also, Millow is in many ways the antithesis of Facebook. Facebook believes connecting people is inherently a good thing — and the more connections, the better. We disagree! Too many low-value connections make it harder for us to focus on those that really matter. This fundamental mismatch in vision makes us believe that the only way for us to get the impact we want is to stay independent forever.

Happy to chat more. This is a topic I have strong opinions on :)

So glad you like the app! We really wanted to encourage more human-to-human connection and get people spending less time on social media. We're hoping that Millow can do that :) Re: permission to access contacts: we're strongly against spamming your contacts (we've had our own negative experiences with apps that do). If you prefer to not give permission to contacts, you can always add friends manually.

When you add a friend to Millow, it lets us know you trust this person and are open to sharing your availability with them (availability is a feature in Millow). If someone you didn't add as a friend adds you to their Millow account, they are not able to see your availability because you did not add them as a friend on your account. We also do not let people know if they have been added to your Millow account, as we feel this is private information.

You can always opt to not share your availability as well, but we have found it helps people break down barriers for communication in different time-zones.

Given the strong preference for desktop/web access here on HN, we will likely be prioritizing this feature earlier than we were before!

Happy to discuss more at support@millow.app and thanks again for the feedback!

These are great questions:

1. You can use Millow (in "single-player" mode) without anyone ever seeing you've added them. You can set reminders for a friend, and log when you meet. This is all private, and won't ever be visible to anyone other than you.

The only feature in the app that currently changes if you've added someone is the "availability" feature. So if you add your availability, and you add someone as a friend, and they add you as a friend, and they see your availability, and then you remove them as a friend, they will cease to be able to see your availability. However, this experience is also identical to the act of deleting your account. So your friend may just think you deleted your account. But yes, your point is still valid, and we don't have a great answer for this. At the end of the day, we want you to only add friends that really matter, and if someone ceases to matter, there's really no easy way for our product to help with the difficult conversation you may have to have.

2. Fair enough! We designed the app for those that need help, so we're happy for you that you're doing this already :)

3. The research (which we mentioned in our learn more section) talks about dormant friends that you would want to reconnect with, but aren't actively in your life. I grew up in Pakistan, and many of my best friends still live there, but now that I'm in California, I don't get a chance to reconnect with them anywhere as often as I'd like. And I also don't know when they're free. Also, even for friends that are local, sometimes life just happens and a lot of time goes by before people meet up. If you don't have friends of this sort, that's great, but this is an issue that many people face, and they're the app's target audience.