Open the 24/7 window to your friends. 🤘

4 min readMar 7, 2017

I’m sure everyone remembers the good old days of AIM and MSN messengers. It was pure magic. As a teenager, at any given time, I had the ability to go online and know that friends of mine were always available to chat. This is what Tribe’s new update is about, using video.

Working on a video messaging app since Fall of 2015.

We started as a small product team of four bored of typing out 100+ text messages per day on tiny mobile keyboards. This led to us dedicating our time building the best video messaging product. With a focus on video group chat, we tried to propose a better alternative than the existing products on the market. We called this “Augmented Messaging”.

People were enjoying it. But despite our efforts, video remains a very slow conversational process, as it is difficult to consume and respond at all times.

“90% of text messages are opened within 3 minutes.” (Source)

In other words, it’s fun, but lacks reliability. We quickly noticed we were far from this “90%-3min” metric. We were not a real day-to-day messaging app. A ‘video voicemail app’ isn’t what we set out to accomplish.

We’re adjusting the direction of our rocketship.

Over the past few months, we’ve noticed a growing demand from our users for a Live feature in the app. The whole team has spent thousands of hours working on this product evolution. In today’s world, everything is live and people are living in the present. Whether it be how we gather our news (Twitter), get from point A to point B (Uber), or quench that need for a juicy burger (Postmates), everything is happening in real time.

Given the ever-present state we live in, we have decided to adjust the platform from Asynchronous to Synchronous. Tribe’s mission is still using video to connect you with the those around you. The user interface will remain the same, as your grid is full of your best friends and groups.

How does it work? Just open the app, see who’s online, and go live with up to 8 other friends at once. This is a product for the “Always on” generation.

Add friends into your live conversation & Hang live with up to 8 of your friends

Live is here.

What’s currently happening in the video messaging space is unbelievably exciting. Teleparty started the live group trend 2 years ago with a bit of fanfare. Since then, Kik, Messenger, HouseParty, Musical.ly and a handful of others have followed in their footsteps, each with their own unique twist.

Building a live-video platform is difficult. Because of these technical challenges, most consumer apps outsource their live video technology. We’ve come to the conclusion that in order to give your users the best possible experience, you need to have full control and own the technology.

This is why we’re thrilled to have our friends from NomadCast join us at Tribe. These guys are truly the best in the business and we couldn’t be more excited to have them on board. They Brought in a unique and widely acclaimed set of live streaming skills and experience that have helped us to enter this space with our own vision and 100% in house technology.

The keys are yours.

People and experiences make life what it is.

Imagine a world where with any given experience, you can have exactly who you want enjoying that experience with you.

What previously was a boring solo Uber ride to work can now include all of my roommates joking around. I can watch French soccer league games with my Parisian friends sprinkled all over Europe while sitting in my room in San Francisco. This is the ability to have a “digital ubiquity”.