We are excited to announce the launch of Sochat! We are officially out of beta and free on the app store for both iOS and Android. 

 
Download here

Chat better with everyone you know and discover anyone you don’t. Explore who’s nearby and make the world around you more interesting. 

 

Magic Words: Special keywords that let you send songs and YouTube videos, play rock paper scissors, make events and polls, say how late you’re running, and many more waiting to be discovered.

 

Nearby: See who’s in the room and in your city. Seamlessly add friends, create groups with the people around you, and chat with people nearby. Swipe cards of new people in your city you’d be up to chat with. If they want to too, we’ll set up a chat for you. 

We also save a history of everyone you’ve bumped into, so forgetting, losing, or never asking for someone’s number is never a problem.

Groups: Chatting with all your friends, teams, clubs, dorms and family shouldn’t suck. Group chats are unlimited in size and have custom notifications for each. Share a link to any group chat for quick friend adding. Easily plan with events and polls, self-destruct any kind of message, and tally up emoji reactions.

Online and Offline: Sochat works everywhere. Literally. Using Wifi, data and Bluetooth, Sochat always lets you text your friends. Our modern Bluetooth technology won’t drain your battery and extends up to 200 feet offline!

Check out our video to learn more!

Our team has been hard at work building Sochat! This brand new release, coming soon, is stocked with powerful and fun chat features. Plus, we’ve enlisted the help of some of the top designers in the U.S. to give Sochat a sleek, beautiful makeover.

We just provided our close friends and family with an early download -- reach out to ryan@sochat.com if you think you can charm him into giving out one of the last downloads ;)

 

Welcome to the world, Sochat! Alpha version is live. Here are some of the cool things Sochat can do:

We're excited to be live! Stay tuned for many updates as we work to make Sochat even better. Happy chatting!

The idea for Sochat came about while I was living in China. I had been working on an app called WeChat and was lucky enough to have a job developing the product and its growth strategy. Ask anyone who's been to China in the past 5 years and they can tell you all about WeChat, because it's everywhere. It totally changed how people in China talked with each other and virtually everyone with a smartphone was a user. Americans like me living in China loved WeChat too -- making group chats for everything, sending voice messages, and using all the app's fun and quirky features. Ryan, my good friend from Harvard, and I chatted about this often, and how we were shocked to hear that our friends in America still just texted most of the time.
 
I left WeChat with one of my colleagues with the goal of building something as impactful as WeChat had been for China, but this time for America, and maybe for the whole world. We built the first version of Sochat in Hong Kong, amidst political protests that raised a lot of questions about the future of secure communication around the world. We then moved back to Palo Alto, California to code away in a little house and prepare for launch.

We believe that messaging is absolutely core to the mobile experience, and people deserve an awesome messaging app that makes talking to anyone convenient and enjoyable, all the while ensuring the utmost in security. After launching our alpha version, we saw big interest at high schools and colleges around the country, and started to see that people really seemed to be into what we’d been building. We learned a ton from our users at those early schools and made a whirlwind of changes and improvements to get ready to launch our beta. 

The product has come a long way and I couldn’t personally go a day without using Sochat now. It’s become absolutely essential and so much fun to use with my friends, family, colleagues, or really anyone. We’re very excited about the future -- a lot of great things are on their way. 

Lukens