Realm is an innovative group communication tool designed specifically for "interest-based socializing", built upon the foundation of friendship connections. Users can find their own world among nearly a hundred realms such as cognitive science, photography, astronomy, and European travel. Within each realm, members interact under various topics using a uniquely designed "dual-layer group chat" approach, sharing their perspectives and connecting with like-minded individuals through the sparks of collision.

I began designing and developing this app in 2018, and it launched in 2019. Within a week of launch, it gained over 10,000 users and subsequently secured angel round investment from Wang Xin.

Realm has always been born out of necessity. From 2015 until the product took shape in 2018, it was a long journey of exploration.

As early as 2014, the social space had already become a red ocean. Countless social products emerged and sank in the market, to the point that in the following two years, the market and entrepreneurial circles developed a strong aversion to social entrepreneurship. Voices like "Is anyone still doing social apps these days? It's a sinkhole" and "Doing social apps now is just feeding traffic to WeChat" were commonly heard.

The industry has been singing the downturn of social apps for a long time. The market is flooded with a vast number of social apps, with all kinds of ambiguous and tempting words stimulating your eyeballs. When social apps became as "common as dirt" like group buying and O2O, people felt that this field was already completely saturated.

However, if you ask users, the busy and confused young people in big cities today, are your social needs fully met?

"What socializing? I don't know where to find people to chat with, and even if I do, I don't know what to talk about. I'd rather stay at home, play some games, and watch short videos."

This is a very paradoxical thing. The social field has become a "red ocean" in the words of the industry, but people's social needs are still weak. You download so many social apps, but still can't find the people you want to find.

I have been observing and thinking about social interaction. The reason is simple: my own deep social needs have not been resolved.

Ever since I got involved with the Internet, I have always hoped to explore new areas, especially in the directions of technology, design, and innovation. Whenever I enter a new field, learning and mastering relevant knowledge is relatively easy. In contrast, making new friends within the field is difficult. Online channels include forums, Facebook groups, Quora, Twitter, and even Reddit, but these methods are quite inefficient, and among them, Reddit, forums, and QQ have gradually been phased out over time. There is currently no good tool to fulfill social needs within a field (interest-based social needs).

In addition to the unmet interest-based social needs, as the concept of communities becomes more prevalent, more and more brands and organizations are beginning to try to build their own communities. However, there is still no tool built specifically for communities. The current common practice is to pull together a WeChat group, but after establishing a WeChat group, there are often two results: 1. After establishment, it quickly falls into silence with no one talking, becoming a dead group. 2. After establishment, it is very active, but there is too much information in the group, leading to noisy voices, and members need to spend a lot of time picking out valuable information from it.

Therefore, in the face of people's unmet needs in communities and interest-based socializing, we hope to gain insight into people's deep-seated needs and innovate from the interaction model to create a tool that solves people's needs.