Hytch
Bringing people together in the physical world.
People spend enormous amounts of time communicating through digital platforms, yet organizing activities in the physical world remains surprisingly fragmented. Making plans often means moving between group chats, maps, event applications, calendars, and transportation services, with no single place where everyone can easily coordinate what they’re doing.
We’re building Hytch to bring those activities together.
At its foundation, Hytch is a group messenger designed around real-world coordination. Conversations connect naturally with places, plans, events, transportation, and shared experiences, allowing people to move more easily from discussing something to actually doing it.
There is an opportunity to build a social platform that encourages people to spend more time together in the physical world rather than simply increasing the amount of time they spend interacting with a screen.
A Different Approach to Social Technology
Much of the social technology developed over the past two decades has focused on content consumption, audience growth, and keeping people engaged within applications.
There’s substantial room for a different approach.
The most valuable interactions often happen away from our devices, whether that’s meeting friends, discovering a new restaurant, attending a concert, exploring a city, or simply spending time together.
Technology can make those experiences easier to organize without becoming the center of them.
Hytch is being developed around that idea, combining messaging with shared plans, places, group coordination, and memories.
Rather than treating location as an additional feature, we’re making the physical world a central part of the experience. Groups can coordinate around places, organize activities, and maintain a shared record of the experiences they’ve had together.
Over time, I want Hytch to become a useful part of how people organize their social lives, helping them discover opportunities, make plans, and follow through on them.
Connecting Social Coordination With Mobility
Transportation is a natural extension of coordinating real-world activities.
When people decide where they’re going and who they’re meeting, the next question is often how everyone will get there.
That creates opportunities to make transportation more efficient, accessible, and coordinated.
Through Hytch, we’re developing ways to connect group planning with shared rides, public transportation, walking, cycling, and other mobility options.
For employers, campuses, venues, and public agencies, these capabilities also create opportunities to encourage transportation behaviors that benefit the broader community.
A rider, an employer, a venue, a transit operator and an agency can each know part of the same trip and still not see it whole. Hytch is being built so the group’s plan and the choice of how to travel sit in one conversation.
This is an important part of MobileFlow’s transportation demand management strategy.
Rather than relying exclusively on infrastructure expansion to address congestion, transportation demand management uses information, incentives, coordination, and other approaches to influence how and when people travel.
Hytch can help make these programs more accessible by connecting transportation choices with the everyday activities that create travel demand in the first place.
SafeRide and Transportation Safety
One of the applications I’m particularly interested in is SafeRide, a program we’re developing through MobileFlow and Hytch to encourage safer transportation decisions.
Impaired driving remains a serious public safety problem, particularly in nightlife and entertainment districts where large numbers of people are traveling to and from the same areas.
SafeRide is designed to use coordination and incentives to encourage people to choose safer ways home rather than driving when they shouldn’t.
The opportunity extends beyond individual users. Venues, hospitality businesses, campuses, event organizers, and other organizations have reasons to support safer transportation, and technology can help them participate in programs that encourage better decisions.
SafeRide should become part of a broader approach to transportation safety, one that helps communities reduce preventable accidents and fatalities while making it easier for people to enjoy themselves responsibly.
SafeRide is one application of Hytch’s broader capabilities, rather than the defining purpose of the messenger itself.
The Larger Opportunity
I believe social technology has considerable room to evolve beyond content feeds and conventional messaging.
As artificial intelligence, location technologies, and digital coordination become more capable, we have opportunities to build software that better understands the activities people are organizing and helps them accomplish those activities with less effort.
That includes planning, discovering places, coordinating groups, managing transportation, and remembering shared experiences.
For businesses and communities, the same underlying capabilities create opportunities to encourage participation, improve transportation coordination, and better connect people with the places around them.
My ambition for Hytch is to build a platform that becomes genuinely useful in everyday life, creating commercial opportunities by helping people spend more time doing things together.