Investors and users alike are convinced and confident that Somewhere Good is the future of our social connection. Less than a year after launching, the platform raised $3.75 million from investors, including the actress, Gabrielle Union. Founded by Naj Austin, and launched at the end of April 2022, Somewhere Good presents an opportunity to strive for more beauty and joy in our interconnections and interactions. In the face of ever-burgeoning conversations on how to engage properly with social media (Shun it? Limit it? Embrace it?), Somewhere Good is Austin’s argument that we deserve better digital spaces.

Unlike most other social media apps, Somewhere Good is not interested in monetising your presence, instead, it wants to explore how the digital can enrich our connection with ourselves, others and nature. On entry, users are given the option to enter one of the following four worlds: Artist Rituals, Communal Care, Radical Library, and Deep Discourse. The average time per user has been 15 minutes, compared to the 5-minute average for new social apps, even though the app has no advertisements, user profiles, friending, following or feed. The business behind the app was created in the early months of the COVID pandemic by Austin, a 2019 Inc Female Founder listee, as a development from her social wellness space for people of colour, Ethel’s Club .

AMAKA: Often, community builders speak of the spiritual background of their childhood as the root of their work. Do you see a direct line from your upbringing to your ventures from Ethel’s Club to Somewhere Good.

Naj Austin: I have always been a gatherer. My mother says I was the one who would go out with little plastic kitchen sets and play-cook for the other neighbourhood kids. I’m the middle child, the one who makes sure everyone is happy and connected and having a good time. 

Community, to me, means generally aligned people who are okay to move through conflict with the positioning of care. And so Ethel’s Club and Somewhere Good have both been pursuits in scaling that idea of community. I’m asking the question: can you scale from the lens of a Black queer woman, someone who has been a part of real-life thriving communities that break and fall apart and mend? My upbringing definitely plays into that and I’m working with an amazing team of community builders in their own right.

Tell us more about what went into the design of the Somewhere Good app? What do you and your team want it to achieve?

Our creative director, Annika Hansteen-Izora, led that and will be able to speak fully about it. But I will say that Somewhere Good, as a brand and as a product, was designed from two points of view. One is the question: Can we make people feel more connected to themselves and in doing so better connected with one another? Without self-connection, you tend to get empty, vapid relationships. To feel grounded with strangers, you need to feel grounded with yourself.

The second aspect was a connection to nature. In all our brainstorms, we kept asking: What does it look and feel like when we are happiest, when we are most at peace with ourselves? And the answer kept circling back to nature. For one, I got really obsessed with how mushrooms work: the familial tissues that tie mushrooms all around the world. From the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we saw how people sought to tether themselves to one another but found it really hard to do so in a meaningful way. 

And so we were interested in the idea of ‘slow social’. How do you add value to people’s lives and not just take? We wanted an app that would be the opposite of doom scrolling and ad attacks. And so our key framework for the app was a dinner party. At dinner parties, you typically feel held. You are invited by someone you know and there are normally no more than two degrees of separation. You have different kinds of really deep conversations going on and generally, everyone moves with a sense of kindness and care.

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Is that why the app is also designed around ephemerality?

Yes. The conversations on the platform last for only 24 hours. Because going back to the dinner parties, you have a good conversation and you want to go home and research and buy the book someone recommended and talk more about it. You do not necessarily have access to that conversation ever again but you want to go back and be friends with that person again. We wanted to mimic that behavioural aspect as well.

A lot of people are experiencing social media fatigue. They say, “Not another social media app! If I want a safe space, I can just create a finsta and reject all ad suggestions on my feed.” Others would rather go to the real outside, not a digitally-simulated outside. Why bother bringing outside into the digital? Why is it important for you to still have faith in the potential of digital safe spaces? How do you convince those people that Somewhere Good is where it’s at?

I feel strongly that both the outside and the digital are necessary and valuable. We are currently working on opening a physical space here in Brooklyn where the amazing online conversations can continue. But I also feel strongly that we deserve better digital spaces, we deserve better everything!

Also from an accessibility standpoint, not everyone has the ability to go outside, especially with the pandemic still being a reality. A lot of people’s IRL (In real life) lives are digital.

As for convincing people that Somewhere Good is where it’s at, the other platforms have done such a good job for us by making their platforms terrible. There has been so much disillusionment with other social media platforms that when we launched, people were excited about it. The week we launched was the week Elon Musk was saying he was going to buy Twitter so that was perfect timing. The average time users spend on new social apps is five minutes and for us, we had 15 minutes in the first week. Having to create your own safe spaces through finstas and private accounts puts the onus back on the consumer; corporations love doing that. But why can’t the space be better by default?

Speaking of reach, how do you define your audience, now and in the future?

So far, our audience has been people who are looking for more intentionality, in their relationships, their passions, their hobbies. People who are looking for other people they can really share and spend time with.

In your interview with TIME, you talked about understating what it’s like to be harassed online as a Black Woman. And so, Somewhere Good is made to prioritise safety. How exactly is Somewhere Good designed to prevent orminimise hate, especially as you scale?

The easiest way to describe that is that it consists of many dinner parties, versus one big dinner party where everyone is sharing space. There are different worlds, and in each world, only 24 people can start a conversation. If you click on one of those 24 conversations, you see six conversations. And so, even when the app is full of conversations, looking at it, you don't see all of that at once. The app is designed around cultivating intimacy.

You were on Inc’s 2019 Female Founders List. As a celebrated founder, what advice would you give when it comes to raising capital and discerning whose money you put into your business?

Understand that capital comes with strings attached. It is not free money. It can feel like there is so much capital floating around but it always trails back to an investor who has specific things they need you to do. Be really intentional about who you raise from; we are talking about a relationship of 10+ years. 

I have had to say no to people because while my company needs capital (oxygen for it to survive), I do not want it to be clobbered to death three years from now because I raised money from someone who does not understand my vision, ethics or business. You want people who want to see the same things as you do. Be as thoughtful about what you pour into your business as you are about the product. 

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Do you see your work in direct opposition to big tech and algorithmic platforms that want to keep our attention trapped? How do you position your work, especially Somewhere Good, in today’s digital tech landscape, particularly as it relates to the attention economy?

The biggest way we differentiate is that I believe good things will always grab someone's attention, and you don't need to pay for it. We are seeing three times the level of engagement with no ads or algorithm manipulations. There is a lot of power in wanting, rather than being forced. When I'm on Instagram, I’m scrolling and just looking at things that don't make me feel good. I'm not excited to go back. I start to have this very contentious relationship with it where I want to move it off my main screen and put timers on it. But with Somewhere Good, people are choosing to spend 15 minutes. We don’t pay you and we don’t pay anybody else to keep you there. You want to be there because it is actually valuable to your life

What do you hope for the long-term future of Somewhere Good?

One of our larger visions is to make Black speech connected across the internet. What does it mean to be Black and online and constantly building the culture in which we all take from? What does that mean in terms of payments? Can we rethink how we offer our critiques, thoughts and jokes? What would it mean to archive all this information? How will we be able to make all kinds of resources and knowledge being shared on the platform accessible and searchable? 

We have a lot of thoughts for the future but right now, we are really focused on that main question: how do we make people feel more connected to themselves and one another when they come on Somewhere Good? Answering this will enable us to do everything else we want. But if we can not get that central part right then everything falls apart..