Jelly's First Week: An Outside-Looking-In Data Analysis

I hope that the quality improves over time and through feature improvements/additions. There seems to be an addictive/sticky aspect to the app and there might even be a community formed through it. I'm interested to see where it goes.

Here is my use-case:

- I do not live in a huge city, but it's decent size (greater metro area is ~400k, city proper is around 50k-80k).

- I do not live near a large "hip" tech center (we have tons of tech in the area, but it's mostly military contractor engineering sorts of stuff).

- Many of my friends are not technical people, and so don't tend to fall in the early adopter category.

- Tangentially to the not being technical part, many of my friends are the sorts of people who don't use Twitter because they don't "get it".

- I don't use Facebook.

- I work in a field dominated by academics, so a lot of my colleagues and the sorts of folks I meet at conferences, etc. tend to be the type of people who don't use Twitter/early adopt new products as well.

- I use Twitter, but due to the stuff above most of the sorts of people that I follow are people that I've never met who do fall in to the categories that I don't fall in to; they live in NY or SF or Boston, they run in a tech-forward-thinking crowd, etc.

Jelly doesn't work for me. When I open the app, it's flooded with a bunch of stuff that's super specific to these tech-hub areas and full of people that I don't know (and who don't live anywhere remotely close to me). The overwhelming popularity of the "Who is this?" question (which is also a little creepy) is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The few people I've met that do use the app walked away with the same opinion; there's nothing there for them.

Here's the thing. Jelly seems like an awesome idea. But it reminds me a lot of Oink and Stamped, which also never really took off. I loved those apps and tried my hardest to get the people around me to use them but I couldn't because there was no community for them there. These ideas are so interlocked to the startup scene filter bubble that it's really hard for them to gain traction with every day folk that have slightly more mundane lives, like me. I wish I knew what the solution was because these ideas are always so cool, but I just don't.