FriendO, a social gaming platform that encourages friends to get to know each other better by answering a series of questions announced that it recently surpassed 2.4 million players in just over six months of operation.
The FriendO platform in available on iOS and Android and supports one-to-one game play, chat between players, various invite features, and a “custom answer” function. The platform also recently introduced a much-anticipated “ask your own question” feature, which has resulted in the addition of over 250,000 user-generated questions to the FriendO database. In February, the company will release “Party Mode,” the first multi-player version of FriendO, which will allow players to invite their friends to a FriendO “party” where they can exchange questions and answers, and chat, in fresh new ways with multiple friends at once.
FriendO’s CEO, John LaValle, who brings more than 20 years of experience fueling growth at technology companies, said: “In just a few months, player engagement has been remarkable, with hundreds of thousands of people engaging on FriendO each day. The viral growth and activity we’ve generated has exceeded our wildest expectations and the new features we have planned for the coming months will only build excitement around our platform. We expect player numbers and player engagement to continue to grow.”
The founders of FriendO – a Gen Z, a Gen X, and a Boomer – created the game after noticing a trend in social media: that users of social media start thinking of people as “followers” instead of as “friends” and, along the way, life becomes a little less interesting and relationships a little less important. FriendO changes that by offering a game platform that strengthens friendships. On the FriendO app, players answer entertaining questions about themselves from a wide variety of topics and guess their friends’ answers to the same questions. The result – game play where users get to know friends better. The goal is to go deeper, not broader, and the deeper users go, the faster they move up the leaderboard.
The team behind FriendO includes investors and entrepreneurs who have significant experience starting and growing consumer-facing businesses. The list includes Brad Jones, whose accomplishments include being the co-Founder of Redpoint Venture Capital, Michael Greenberg, President of Skechers, and Mucker Capital, a seed-stage technology venture capital fund based in Los Angeles.
FriendO has quietly been one of the fastest growing apps in the App Store, averaging several hundred thousand daily users. In the past 90 days, it’s trended #1 in the App Store numerous times and has ranked among the Top 50 free apps and top 5 social networking apps.
