Touch’d is an app which enables you to stay in touch with your most important relationships in a hyper-connected world.
Now, with Touch’d you can choose a circle of friends to stay in contact with regularly. This new app provides the user with contextual notifications about the most opportune moments to reach out to the circle of friends e.g. when they experience a life event or when they are visiting the city etc. It uses sophisticated algorithms that constantly rank your friends based on contextual and interaction signals and reminds you to be in touch with your friends twice a day, every day.
Touch’d is solving a problem for people who have large social networks and busy lives. The vision for Touch’d is to create a personal and professional graph that is better than Facebook and LinkedIn. These networks only highlight who you are connected to, whereas Touch’d can identify how well you are connected to these contacts and what is the trust level and the direction of the trust relationship.
This has huge implications e.g. letting users find people to recruit, befriend someone or ask a favor of, not just based on how many hops away they are, but by following the strongest relationship path to them (person A is in my inner circle, and person B is in person A’s inner circle). When you throw ‘reciprocal trust path’ into the mix (person A is in my inner circle and I’m in his, and person B is in person A’s inner circle and vice versa), you will get invaluable insights into how best you can leverage your circle of trust for tasks such as finding an ideal recruit, approaching an angel investor or getting a recommendation. The opportunities are endless.
Touch’d is creating a new space, which it calls ‘Personal Relationship Management’. The only company that comes close to attempting to do what Touch’d is doing is Accompany and even after 2 years of raising $20M it is still in the beta phase. Touch’d’s unique selling point is the conviction that no relationship is purely a business relationship. Essentially, all relationships are relationships between people which is true even for inter-organizational relationships. The fundamental mistake that current incumbents make is by treating relationships as prospects and leads and not people. This works for certain purposes like CRM and sales pipeline management but it leaves a very huge gap of improving people’s relationships with high value contacts on a human level. The metrics of Touch’d are not sales or leads or deal sizes but joy, sorrow, friends and family giving Touch’d the mass consumer appeal that other platforms cannot hope to match.
Touch’d has a global audience. Even in Pakistan there are a lot of internet connected professionals with smart phones now. With the recent rollout of 3G/4G and steeply falling prices of Android smart phones, they can potentially garner tens of millions of users from Pakistan. Since their product went live, they have stopped relying on customer surveys and top-down market analysis, and are instead looking at their analytics and engagement numbers to gauge demand. They managed to get hundreds of users just from one Facebook post, and a good percentage of them are daily active users which validates their product / market fit. The next milestone is to grow the user base to thousands of users, and their upcoming official launch in March is geared towards this goal.
Touch’d is currently live on the Google Play store, and their official launch is planned for March. Check out the app here, or follow them for continuing updates on Facebook or Twitter or visit the website www.touchd.us.
