Need a Friend(.com)?

Hey y’all — every moonshot needs a great origin story.

The Social Network forever immortalized Mark Zuckerberg’s sometimes immature but nuanced rise from awkward college kid to multi-billionaire fending off legal challenges.

The claim, of course, was that Zuck had stolen Facebook from the now-crypto-rich-so-who-cares Winklevii.

It was hard to not think about the Facebook story this week when Harvard-dropoff Avi Schiffmann launched Friend.com — an uncomplicated but undoubtedly dystopian AI-powered wearable pendant.

Here’s the launch video ICYMI:

Why did it make me think of Facebook?

Well…

Another young founder, Thiel Fellow Nik Shevchenko, claimed Schiffman stole his idea + name, and posted a hilarious (some may say unhinged) rap diss video directed at Schiffman:

Shevchenko then announced that he raised a second fundraising round for his Friend in the 24 hours after Schiffman launched his.

Oh, and Schiffman paid $1.8 million for the Friend.com domain (remember, this is a seed stage company with only a few million raised in total that’s building hardware).

If this all sounds like irrelevant nonsense, that’s because it is — but the chaos helped Schiffmann’s Friend.com become the biggest product launch of the summer (23 million views on X alone, and likely tons of pre-orders).

But after you nail the launch, what happens next? How do you capitalize on the momentum?

This week I’m breaking down where Friend(.com) goes from here, and why spending $1.8 million on a domain is actually a bullish signal for the company:

Need a Friend(.com)?

Hype Matters

First — how could a founder possibly justify that domain expense so early on, especially when they have to also build hardware?

Schiffmann understands that the bar for anyone to care about a consumer product that has a broad target market (lonely people) is incredibly high. It’s unlike launching a niche consumer product, or b2b product, where there are common threads you can easily pull on to get users excited.

Layer on that it’s hardware that changes their day-to-day lives, and it takes real gravity to penetrate the cultural zeitgeist to the degree you need to, in order to have staying power.

That’s why the production quality on the launch video is so high too.

It’s a high-risk, high-reward moonshot launch — you have no choice but to go all-in.

Could he have met that bar without owning friend.com? Maybe, but:

• We’re talking about it

• The price would’ve considerably gone up if he bought it post-launch

• He’s now going to raise a lot more money (more on that below)

I suspect he “gets it” because of his previous viral launches around a COVID-19 tracker during the pandemic and an “Airbnb for Ukraine refugees” at the beginning of the current war.

Last year I shared my 5-step playbook for how startups create hype.

Schiffmann launched after already going through the first 4 stages and, if the product delivers on user expectations when it ships in Q1 of next year, has a legitimate shot of cracking the fifth as well.

But there’s a long road between now and then.

What Happens Next?

It’s easy to think that the next six months until the hardware is delivered will be about making sure it’s perfect, but there are actually three things that are more important and need to happen first:

First, Friend will raise a big round off the back of this launch. Hype is spiking massively — that’s the time when it’s easiest to get the partners you want and a lot of competitive offers quickly.

I’m writing this on Friday and the launch was on Tuesday but the round may already be done.

Second, Schiffmann needs to use that capital to get the right people onboard for the next phase of the company.

And third, he needs to plan with those people how to generate this same type of viral hype when delivery happens and the ability to order one for immediate delivery becomes real.

MKBHD is already saying he’ll do a review, but a product with a broad target market like Friend has the potential to go much wider (unlike the largely panned competitors Rabbit and Humane that only have niche appeal — if any — for which the MKBHD review video was the highest value exposure they’re likely to receive).

When you have PMF and things are moving insanely fast, the problem isn’t getting more hype — it’s being strategic about what channels and tactics to spend your time on.

This is the biggest test currently in front of Schiffman as a CEO.

Friend’s Future

True moonshots are the hardest businesses to build because things move faster than you can imagine with other types of businesses (even compared to other startups).

You have to be incredibly disciplined about saying no.

As a result, other founders should have implicit respect for anyone who takes the shot and goes all-in like Schiffmann has — especially now that he’s nailed the takeoff.

Unforeseen things can go wrong, but I think it’s likely we’ll continue to hear about Friend for some time. Schiffmann’s previous viral launches of side projects will help prepare him for what he knows is his first big shot on goal.

And as we’ve seen, digital friends are one of the initial true killer use cases for LLMs — Character.ai was just sort-of acqui-hired by Google for $2.5 billion and is one of the stickiest AI apps.

So there’s a lot of reasons to be bullish on Friend.

However I can’t help but feel a bit sad about it.

Products are a reflection of the world they come from, and Schiffman notes on Friend’s blog that Friend is “an expression of how lonely I’ve felt.”

I care less about the idea of other people wearing recording devices around their necks all the time than other people will (though, yes, it’s dystopian and I personally wouldn’t buy one) but when I think about a future where everyone has a Friend who they rely on for emotional support or to help them manage their loneliness, it’s a reminder that those people are lonely and sad in the first place.

And, to me, Friend doesn’t solve those issues. It, instead, feels like a bandaid on top of that problem that will just “feel” good.

But that’s just another reason to be bullish on its future — people find it easier to slap a bandaid on than address a root cause.

Ironically, Friend’s launch video actually addresses this as its concluding point, where the Friend-user who is on a date goes to speak to her Friend but then stops herself because the connection with her human date is fulfilling her need for connection at that moment.

It’s a subtle and arguably hopeless admission that, yes, the real thing is actually better but not having that is so common that you probably want this AI.

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