A number of startup are experimenting with a better social app. The answer is a social network that focuses on users' well-being through participation in creator-led challenges in areas like personal growth, sustainable living, and others with positive impacts. Instead of driving the collection's popularity, Alms wants to encourage real-world engagement through its challenges and the specific steps and actions that must be taken.
The idea is to design an app that will make users happy and more meaningful when they use it. Modern social platforms can not promise to do that.
The project began in the early days of the Pandemic.
He says that a lot of them were feeling depressed and sad at home. I felt like the world needed something more than just meditation, journaling, or mood tracking, but they weren't designed to improve your life on a day-to-day basis, interacting in the real world
The original version of Alms did not have something that would make it sticky. Users would sign up because they liked the concept, but eventually they would stop participating in the activities. The startup knew it needed something more to tie users to their journeys, which is why it has now shifted to become more of a social community.
Alms is the image.
When you first launch the Alms app, you are taken through a brief process where you pick your interests from three main areas: personal growth, sustainable living, and impact. Mental health, spirituality, and relationships are examples of things that may be included in personal growth interests. Environmental and nature interests are the focus of "Sustainability". Impact would encompass things like activism, volunteering, and more.
After setup is complete, you can follow creators who post challenges or join individual challenges, each with their own set of steps that have to be taken in order to complete them. In a challenge focused on improving your work-from- home lifestyle, the steps guide users to take steps to improve their workspace and their work-life balance by scheduling breaks and hard stops to their day.
When you participate in a challenge by completing and checking off each step, you are prompted to post a story about that step in the challenge feed to inspire others, who may add an encouraging comment. The goal of Alms is not gathering likes and comments.
More and more people with expertise in personal growth, sustainable living, and impact of various sorts could be allowed to scale their impact with us. We allow them to put all their knowledge in a way that people can understand, but not like it, and try to repeat it.
At launch, Alms has around 30 creators sharing their content in the form of challenges on its app, and 15 more are in the works. Over the next few months, it hopes to reach a couple of hundred. The new version of the app has attracted a couple of thousand users.
Alms is the image.
Many of the challenges on the app have been joined by hundreds of users, so you feel a sense of participation when you click to join. I would prefer that posting a story and sharing it to the feed was optional, not every step deserves its own post. Sometimes, you don't have anything to say about the minor steps you completed and end up feeling like you've cluttered the feed with less-than-helpful posts.
Alms was founded with Palta, a studio that created apps like Flo.Health and Simple Fasting. The company has no other outside investment, as Palta owns a majority stake in Alms. The Alms app isn't currently monetized, but a remotely distributed team of fourteen works on it.
The team is considering adding some sort of token-based economy or perhaps a DAO, which would convey some sort of real-world rewards. This could include being able to join a creator fund. The token would not be tradeable in the near term. Simple ideas, like in-app tipping, may be considered by the company. Alms is still working on product-market fit and scaling its user base.
Alms could appeal to those who want to be more conscious about how they spend their time on social apps, but who are also in search of inspiration that comes with more specific direction.
People place hopes on what will happen in the future without actually influencing it. I think that having an app that helps you with ideas and inspiration from people who know what they share, what they recommend, is helpful, especially when it's all about support. People on Alms actually care.
The app is well-designed and well-built. It could still face the issue of having users drop off, despite its new social components, given the competition for screen time on today's mobile devices.
For now, Alms is a free download on the App Store.
