Aiming to put the “social” back into “social media,” a new app called noplace has climbed to the top of the App Store after exiting invite-only mode on Wednesday. Designed to appeal to the younger crowd — or anyone looking to connect with friends or around shared interests — noplace is like a modern-day MySpace with its colorful, customizable profiles that let people share everything from status of the link to what they are listening to or watching, what they are reading or doing, etc.
Boding well for its potential in the often difficult consumer social market, noplace had already gone viral before its public launch due to its feature that allows users to express themselves by customizing their profile colors. While Gen Z may not have grown up with MySpace and all its chaotic customizations, there’s still a sense of nostalgia for a social networking experience they never had.
“I think that part of the magical, fun part of the Internet is gone. It’s all very uniform,” says founder and CEO Tiffany Jong, who previously founded her own early-stage consumer fund, Pineapple Capital, and in her teenage years worked at Binary Capital helping them close consumer deals at an early stage.
Having played with every consumer social app for the past decade, Zhong has a keen eye for the next big hit. She tagged Musical.ly in 2015 as the startup that would become the next Snap or Twitter, for example, after realizing how much traction it had with kids and other younger users.
She also frequently tweeted her product insights and analysis, especially for consumer applications, gaining a following on social media. Given her background, it’s no surprise that Zhong has well-developed ideas about what might appeal to today’s younger users in a new social networking app.
“I’ve always loved social media,” she says, but adds that social media no longer feels social. “It’s all just media. I feel very disconnected.”
That’s partly because all of our content is now highly personalized, says the founder. “We’re looking at different content and [following] different interests than our friends, so community is harder to find as a result,” she says.
Without Place, the idea is to provide a place where people can follow their friends as well as find others who share their interests in one place.
The app offers a customizable mini profile where they can share what they’re up to and customize it to reflect their interests. User profiles can include tags that the app calls “stars,” which are their interests or topics of interest. For example, users can add their astrological sign, their Myers-Briggs personality type, their hobbies, or their fandoms to their profiles, which then makes them discoverable to others. It even has a “10 Best Friends” section, reminiscent of MySpace’s top 8.
But noplace looks less like a global group chat or Twitter/X rival than it does a Facebook alternative, as it focuses on text updates and doesn’t yet support photos or videos.
“Facebook 10 years ago — or Facebook when I used it in middle school — was all over the place, great, life updates,” Zhong says. “We don’t understand this anymore, do we? You can follow [friends] on Instagram, but there are still highlights, fewer updates.”
Also, on noplace, users should share what they are currently doing, not what they have already done. If you’re in a new city or watching a show or checking out a new band, these could be your status updates. The app offers two feeds, one with your friends and another global feed from everyone in the app and both are in reverse chronological order. There are no private profiles.
People coming of age as younger than 18 will also get a more moderated feed. The company focuses on moderation, having built its own internal dashboard for the purpose and assigning a team to ensure user safety.
Instead of algorithms, noplace uses AI technology to drive suggestions and curate. The app doesn’t edit the feed for you, but rather uses AI to do things like suggest recaps of what you’ve missed.
“We did this intentionally … having a global, public feed is what makes it so fun. It’s like everyone’s brain on paper,” notes Jong. “People are having fun. They say, “I’ve never had an app like this before.”
The Tokyo- and San Francisco-based founder first started working on noplace in the second half of last year alongside a remotely distributed team of seven full-time people. Late last year, noplace launched an invite-only beta phase and “accidentally went viral,” Zhong says, prompting the team to distribute some invite codes to early adopters, including some K-pop fans.
The app is now poised to offer younger Twitter users an alternative to the network, now known as X under Elon Musk, as it offers the same ability to post to a text-based feed, but combines this with friend-finding features and customization options , that appeal to their demographic.
The app is a free download for iOS and is available in read-only mode on the web. Monetization plans are not yet underway.
Noplace is backed by funding from investors including 776 (Alexis Ohanian), Forerunner Ventures and others. According to PitchBook data, the company raised $15 million in a Series A1 round at a pre-money valuation of $75 million, bringing its total raise to north of $19 million.
