---
date: 2019-10-27
modified_at: 2020-05-30
tags: [entrepreneurship, philosophy, programming, social-media]
description: The journey from creating an addictive mafia game to building FriendTime, an app designed to bring people together in real life and maintain meaningful relationships.
---
# Why I made FriendTime

When I was eleven years old, I learned how to make websites. When I was twelve I
created a mafia game (For a similar example, see Omerta
https://barafranca.com/). Creating this game, and playing other games myself,
took most of my free time. I was hooked. Addicted. Hard to separate from my
computer. It was an amazing experience to create and maintain a mafia game for a
couple hundred daily active users for over ten years, but it was also very
stressfull at times, and the ethic side doubtful. One the one hand, I had
created a wonderful playground for young kids to compete, learn and socialize
online. At first, this made me very happy. But then I discovered the dark side.
Some kids were burning their parents money and others were playing over 8 hours
a day on average. This made me very unhappy, but I couldn't just pull the plug.
This made me depressed for a while. I quit a few years later.

Twelve years after I learned how to make websites, after finishing my bachelors
in Artificial Intelligence, I traveled the world for 6 months. Weeks went
without screens.. It made me less of a nerd, way more social, and also
incredibly happy. What did I really want? After traveling, I decided I wanted to
make an app that bring people together. Away from their screens. Because this
had made ME so much happier too.

For about six months, I burned through all my money while working full time on
my first attempt: Communify https://communify.cc. In hindsight, many things
went wrong. It was over developed, complex and had no good business model. What
was even worse, is that it took away some of the business of the clients I was
hoping to sell it to: the Coworking Space. The Coworkers loved the idea, but the
coworking space hated it. Too bad. I had failed. As a result, I had an
existential crisis that lasted two months.

About 10 months after failing and one regular office job later, I decided to
move to Amsterdam, learn more about startups, and try again. I love the vibe in
the startup scene. I learned a lot really quickly. Even had two startup jobs at
the same time. Read almost a dozen of books about startups. Also, I've read 
Deep
Work http://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/, Digital Minimalism
http://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/ and became very much
inspired by Humane Tech https://humanetech.com/. Also, I read a lot about
relationships (Robin Dunbar
https://www.amazon.com/Many-Friends-Does-Person-Need/dp/0674057163, Catherine
Price https://phonebreakup.com/, Susan Pinker
https://www.susanpinker.com/the-village-effect/, and more). These books have
all inspired me so much, I came up with the next attempt...

This time I came up with FriendTime. A completely different approach for the
same goal: bringing people together. When entering a new environment, it can be
a challenge to make friends, and certainly the right ones, and meaningful ones.
Also, I noticed that I had made hundreds of 'friends' in my life, but had very
few active ones. Most of my friendships were very low-level.

Professionally, it was hard to remember all professional connections I made in a
short time. It all become a lot, really quickly. Email. Slack Channels.
Whatsapp. LinkedIn. My professional contacts are everywhere, except where I
really want them: On events, so we can actually talk IRL. Consequently, I made
dozens of new connections in a couple of months but it didn't have a big impact
because they were all very low-level connections. The ones I wanted to keep in
touch with, got burried under hunreds of other connections on LinkedIn, or below
hundreds of e-mails. Why is this so hard!?

In March of this year I started working on FriendTime. It's my best attempt on
solving all these problems (and even a few more).