When people ask what I'm building, the short answer is a living world. People in real cities, living a life they chose. There's no feed or follower count at the centre of it; there's a city and a career. I've been explaining this face to face for about a year, and the questions always come at the same points, so I wanted to write the long answer down once.
The one-line answer
I've been asked to describe BeMatrx in one line so many times that the answer has settled into this:
A living world is people in real cities, living a life they chose.
I keep it short because a definition only sticks if people can remember it and pass it on. Almost everyone who hears it asks two more things: what happens when you leave the app, and what you're actually working toward. Here's what I tell them:
The world doesn't stop when you close the app. Your city is still there and life in it carries on. When you come back, a few things have changed while you were gone.
What counts here is the life you build: your job, your home, the people you know.
How it differs from social media
A living world isn't social media, and it isn't trying to be a better version of it. A feed is a tool built for a different job, and plenty of apps do that job well. What we're doing is different, so it needed its own name.
The basic unit here is a life. What matters is what you've built up since you arrived: your career, a city that knows you, people who'd notice if you didn't show up for a while. To judge whether the place is working, I ask the questions you'd ask about a real town. Is anyone building something here? Do people run into each other? If it shut down tomorrow, would anyone miss it? The rest of the product grew out of those questions.
The four things people kept asking for
I didn't come up with this category at a desk. As I described the idea over dinners and in passing conversations, people of all ages kept coming back with the same four wishes. Over time the product formed around them.
The first is time that leaves something behind. People want twenty minutes to move something forward: a shift at work, a friendship, a city they're slowly getting to know. That's the core mechanic of a living world. Whatever you put time into is still there the next day, one step further along.
The second is knowing why you're seeing something. People relax when that answer fits in one sentence. Ours does: what's in front of you is decided by you and the people you follow, newest first. There's no ranking algorithm in between. That was a deliberate decision, so I wrote about it in a separate post.
The third is a third place. Sociologists use the term for spots that are neither home nor work, where you run into people and things can start. A lot of people told me they missed having one. In a living world that means cafés, clubs and city squares. When you walk in, you meet whoever happens to be there at the time.
The fourth is the newest: a place where a machine isn't making the calls. As AI shows up in more of daily life, people tell me they want at least part of the day to move by their own choices. I'm not saying this because I'm against AI; I built this world with an AI tool. In BeMatrx we don't build a profile from your behaviour to pick what you see. How your day goes is up to your own choices.
At a glance
| In a living world | |
|---|---|
| The unit | A life: a career, a city, a story |
| What decides what you see | You and the people you follow, newest first |
| What counts | What you built while you were there |
| When you close the app | Your city stays put and is there when you return |
| Who you'll meet | The people of a city living its own life |
Why I call it a living world
When something new comes along, people first compare it to something they know. Ride-sharing was "like a taxi, but..." for years, and streaming was "like TV, but...". Eventually nobody needed the comparison anymore. I think the same will happen with living worlds, so I use the term everywhere: in the app, in interviews, on this page. "Social media" makes people picture a feed, and there's no feed at the centre here. A living world doesn't ask you to drop your other apps, either. It sits next to them and does a different job at a different hour of your day.
If you're curious how someone with no software training built this, that story is here. The details behind "no algorithm" are in the next post.
