Legacy social media sites have been designed to keep us hooked to our devices, eyes glued endlessly to retina-frying feeds of memes and dumb videos in order to create more engaged platforms for advertisements. In recent years, however, a swell of companies have sought to capitalize on users’ burnout, pushing users to engage in IRL experiences, or offering products without addictive features like endless scroll.
Bond, which officially launched on Tuesday, is one of those sites. Dino Becirovic, Bond’s co-founder and CEO, says that his site offers an AI-powered solution to Americans’ screen addiction.
The site works like this: Much like a normal social media platform, users post about what they’ve been up to lately. Bond allows users to update their profiles, posting what it calls “memories,” via a variety of mediums, including pictures, video, and audio files.
Unlike other sites, Bond is designed to act as a kind of idea generator for what the user should go and do in the real world.
Experiences stored within Bond become fodder for its AI system, which then gets trained on what kind of personalized, event-based recommendations to make to the user, Becirovic says.
For instance, if you’ve been posting a lot about how much you like Pho and how you haven’t had it in awhile, Bond’s system might recommend a nearby Vietnamese restaurant that is getting good reviews. Or, if you’re into heavy metal, Bond might point out that Iron Maiden is coming to your city next week.
The more you post about your experiences, the more the system can feed you better recommendations, Becirovic says.
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In other words, the system is designed to get you off the app and back out into the real world, where you can do more stuff, instead of just “bed rotting” and “doomscrolling,” as the kids these days say.
The layout looks a little bit like Instagram, although there is no actual feed. Instead, user profiles are presented in a kind of cluster formation. Clicking on a profile brings up the user’s current stories. These stories disappear from your public-facing profile after 24 hours, Becirovic said, but they then get stored in your private profile. Users can search through their own archive of memories whenever they want.
Bond’s team includes people who previously built major social media apps, including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook,the company says. Becirovic previously worked at Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, while Bond’s founding researcher, Arthur Bražinskas, co-led integration of user signals at Google Gemini.
What is the revenue path for a company like this? Most social media sites are justgiant vehicles for advertising— and that’s where they make the lion’s share of their revenue. Bond doesn’t have ads, so how’s it going to turn a buck?
Interestingly enough, Becirovic envisions a scenario in which — eventually — users can license their own data from Bond’s archives, selling it to companies that want to use it for AI-training purposes. In this scenario, Bond would take a very small cut of the profits via a licensing fee, thus generating ongoing revenue and positioning itself as a data provider to AI companies that are looking to tune up their models.
“The idea behind this licensing model is that you can monetize your memories,” he said. “If we become this platform with the right incentive structure to get billions of people to create about their daily lives, we will naturally become a really attractive place for people to want to train GPT six and seven, all the other variants that are going to come future.”
In another scenario, Bond would use its accumulated data to act as a product recommendation tool that integrates with e-commerce sites. “Our users would opt into this experience. If we are able to do this, we believe we could capture some value from the transaction with merchants by enabling a better user experience, driving conversion, and/or increasing throughput,” Becirovic told TechCrunch in an email.
Becirovic said that Bond would never sell users data for the purposes of advertising, and users can “delete any memories by either deleting them in the Memory tab or using natural language in Memory chat.” He added: “Users can also delete their profile if they are not getting value from Bond. As the product grows, we will introduce more privacy control features to our users for them to manage their data.”
Becirovic said Bond will improve its encryption over time, though he is a little vague about the platform’s current protections: “E2EE encryption is a priority for us in the near-future after launch. In the meantime, we store all user data securely in our database and ensure it is protected,” he said.
At the moment, Becirovic seems mostly focused on making Bond cool. “Monetization is not a short-term priority,” he said. “Our initial focus is on creating an application users get more value from the more they capture their memories.”