It combines live-streaming video from one-to-many with simultaneous chat from many-to-many. The result is a social media experience that feels like you are actually “hanging with” other participants.
Originally, the goal of the platform was to create a more authentic experience for celebrities and social media power users to allow them a more direct connection with fans in a way that photo, text and video posts don’t provide.
The original model was to charge users a small monthly subscription fee to hang w/ their favorite people. However, when the platform was in beta and we realized how amazing it was to hang w/ ordinary people and follow the lives of our friends and coworkers live, we scrapped the subscription model and went with an ad-supported model that allowed anyone to be a broadcaster or a follower.
The result is a global platform in which you’ll find kids from Chicago hanging w/ pro-athletes in Los Angeles, and musicians in Germany hanging with entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. Because the platform and the experience is so new, we are literally seeing it defined before our eyes. We are seeing patterns of use appear among the randomness.
We’ve found that some users have turned Hang w/ into their own live streaming talk show platform. Many of whom will broadcast for hours at a time, holding the attention of a cross section of users who ask questions, comment, and chat with each other.
We have celebrity users who have turned to Hang w/ to foster powerful relationships with their fans. Timbaland can be found on Hang w/ having deep meaningful conversations with followers. 50 Cent has used the platform to release new music live before it is heard anywhere else. Kaskade uses Hang w/ to bring his fans along for the ride on a whirlwind of an international tour. Larry the Cable Guy treated his fans to a live backstage tour at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Ali Landry broadcasted live from the delivery room. Terrell Owens shared the experience of throwing the football with Tom Brady. And the list goes on and on.
As users adopt the platform, our team is working almost around the clock to make it the best live-streaming social media experience possible. We are constantly learning what our users want, and we are adjusting to meet their needs. For instance, originally we thought users would prefer that, “What happens on Hang w/ stays on Hang w/,” but that’s not the case. They want to share, so we added the ability to stream a broadcast live to Facebook. We thought that users would want a short “snackable” broadcast unit. So we started with three-minute broadcasts. But they asked for more time. So we added six and nine minutes, and we’ll be adding longer units moving forward.
We still consider ourselves very much at the beginning of this amazing journey. But this much we know to be true. Life is better when we’re with each other live.
Andrew Maltin is the CEO and founder of Hang w/. Hang w/ has attracted more than 85 celebrities, athletes, and public figures to date – including artists Timbaland, 50 Cent, Kaskade and Paula Abdul; athletes Terrell Owens, Chad Ochocinco, Coco Crisp and Shaun T. Fitness; comedians Larry The Cable Guy, Jamie Kennedy, Cheech & Chong; MMA champions Frank Trigg, Urijah Faber, Mike Chandler, and K.J. Noons; and many others. Andrew is also the CEO an founder of MEDL Mobile is a custom developer and aggregator of mobile applications. Nearly 250 MEDL apps more than 18,000,000 downloads and the MEDL library is expected to grow to more than 1,000 apps this year. The library is powered by a “MEDL Brain” which learns user preferences and recommends new apps proactively.
