It may sound like another social network, but Wonderloop sees themselves firmly in the social discovery space.
In the registration the app makes you create a video profile before you can dig around the app. During this process they give you examples of three other profiles, so you’ve got some reference of what to do before sticking your phone up to your face, but aside from that they keep it pretty open ended.
“You could talk about your cat for 20 seconds, that’s ok,” says Aase. “But if theres something you could say in 20 seconds to a complete stranger, then you’re probably going to talk about your hopes and dreams.” After you create your profile, you can add tags to make yourself more searchable.
Right now Wonderloop has launched themselves in sort of a Mailbox style fashion, where they’re limiting the amount of new profiles to ensure they don’t accidently become chat roulette.
Once your profile is up there, the main feature of the app is to make introductions, so third parties can connect people and profiles if they think they think some people would get along. Wonderloop provides bookmarking of people, as well as direct messages. But rather than building up a new social network, it’s their goal to see more new connections across LinkedIn or Facebook, for example.
After this launch, they hope to hire on the tech side to plug in better algorithms and matching systems to their tags. To do so, they’ll have to raise some capital, so Aase is working out of New York for the time being to be closer to investors that that are interested in taking more risk than perhaps most Norwegian investors.
After hearing about Wonderloop, it sounds like an app that should already exist – It seems like something people would pick up. But like all sorts of mobile startups in this area, they’ll have to figure out how to monetize that value, whether directly or as an acquisition. Regardless, I’ll have to take a deep look at myself to try to find out how to describe myself to the world for 20 seconds without crying on camera.