Afinity is a social network that facilitates friendly meetings, events, or activities in real life.
Afinity is a social network that facilitates friendly meetings, events, or activities in real life. Our purpose is to create true and local connections between people all over the world. This is achieved through a specialized interface that makes it easy for you to meet new people who share a same passion.
But, first of all, Afinity is a community support where everyone is organizing events and everyone is participating in them.
Another important point: it´s totally free! There’s absolutely no charge for organizing or participating!
With Afinity, every member will be able to easily find a precise event among thousands. For example: Suppose you want to go out tomorrow evening, and you are an art aficionado. You will have the choice between several exhibitions and events. You can check who is organizing and who is participating in each activity. Finally, you simply join the event of your choice.
Afinity will automatically do the job for you. It will suggest several kinds of activities according to your preferences and availability:
Precisely, the magic word is TRUST. As Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky puts it, “Trust, mediated by technology, is making a comeback.”
We are living in a world where the sharing economy, or “collaborative consumption,” has reached an unprecedented scale. You can easily book a room in a stranger’s house, take a ride in a stranger’s car, or buy anything you want from an unknown seller. Why not apply this system to entertainment and activities?!
The act of rating services is now well set in the public’s mind. We are now doing that every time and it´s working just fine. So, once an event is over, participants will be able to leave a review about their experience:
Also, it´s important to know the participant´s reliability—if they will really come to the event, if they will be on time, and so on. So, we integrate a reliability system:
If any member joins an activity and ends up not coming, the organizer can decide to leave a “warning sign” or not, depending on if this member let him know in advance or not. The more “warning signs” a participant receives, the lower his reliability rating will be, so everyone will know who’s reliable or not.
Well… absolutely all you have in mind (within all decent-minded reasoning, of course!):
For professionals, sport associations, art galleries, concert bars…
Teachers, trainers, instructors…
or anyone who wants to organize an activity in return for money.
Lessons: dance, sports, cooking, computing, languages …
Sporting competitions, tournaments …
Meetings: philosophy, sociology, history, spiritual …
Product presentations, beauty care …
The following budget is a minimum to develop this project and allow Afinity to exist:
This budget will permit us to develop the Website and the App. It will be enough to make it work, but you can imagine that, with that budget, it will be a basic version. It will only include the necessary features:
Our objective is to offer you the best quality network imaginable. Take a look at our stretch goals!
Afinity’s concept came to my mind about a year ago when I first used both Apps Airbnb and Uber for the first time during a trip to Latin America.
I realized the importance and the potential of a community of people who trust one another, thanks to the support of technology!
Why limit us to share commercial services like transportion or accommodations? Why not share activities, events and our passions together -for free- with the same technology!?
Defining a clear goal for our project is also going to help us get there faster. So we developed the concept, giving a structure to all our ideas and designing the mechanisms of Afinity.
In this step we visually conceptualized the main features, the approximated layout and the structure of our application. By developing sketches we are laying the foundation for your future interface.
Found out similar apps and analyse them. Who are our competitors all over the world, what they´re proposing.
We investigated the technical requirements for the Website & App and how to market and monetize Afinity.
We found design inspiration, defined the aesthetics and chose the name. We create a logo and an app icon.
In this phase our ideas and features fuse into a clearer picture. We started to develop a demo version of the Website, customized the design, and made it responsive.
Website development: Hosting, Registering a Domain Name, Planning (navigation design, information architecture, create a site map & Content), Designing and Building and then… Publishing! And then we will Promote & Maintain our website.
App development: Create a Wireframe and Storyboard, Define the Back End of the App, test the Prototype, Build the Back End, design the App “Skins”, test Again (Yes, Again), refine each detail and… it´s Release Time! And then Promoting & Maintaining the App!
Kickstarter backers have the vision to know how technology can change their lives. The money we raise here will allow us to make Afinity come true—but, more than that, we are here to build a community. Allow us to share our vision with you: To get people back to their roots, experiencing authentic relationships beyond their screen.
At the moment the Afinity Team consists of two highly motivated individuals, based in Lyon, the second biggest city in France.
We truly believe in this wonderful project; however, one of our biggest challenges, once the App is up and running, will be to get as quickly as possible a considerable number of members. It’s necessary to reach a “critical mass” to ensure the proper operation of the system.
With only 0.1% of the population of any big city, it would work just fine. For a metropolis like New York, it represents about 10,000 members. Imagine if only 5% of these members were organizers. That would equate to 500 people. If each were to organize just 2 events per month, that means we would have 30 events every single day of the year!
The promotional labor starts with the Crowfunding campaign itself, and the possibility for you, our backers, to be part of the project as creators and beta testers. In this way you will also be the first members of this community, and your contributions will help to generate the interest of many new people.
Then, in order to guarantee success, we prepare a marketing strategy:
Well… we just answered this question above.