Behind the early days of an Austin startup

• Founders Rich Fortune, 26, and Armando Vera Carvajal, 33, have raised roughly $200,000 in angel investment and regularly clock super-long days at their three-person company. (The third person is an engineer.)
• Fortune grew up in Virginia, and Vera Carvajal — a University of Texas graduate who co-founded the startup accelerator Astralabs — is originally from Mexico.

We caught up with them to talk about the app and what it's like trying to build a company in Austin.

What's unique about Hangtight?

RF: "We're going after the demographic that Facebook lost. The big thing is: How can we create more excitement about people hanging out together in real life? Our demographic is obsessed with status. We post everything about our everyday lives.

• The original idea was planning and scheduling to hang out with friends, and we've added more social aspects. Hangtight is the newspaper of what our friends have done."

How do your own backgrounds inform the company?

RF: "Armando is a Mexican immigrant. I'm a Black kid from Virginia. We're not your standard Stanford dropout.

• What we represent and why Austin is such a great place to start a company is that it feels like no one is from here. Everyone's super welcoming. We're the blueprint of what entrepreneurship looks like in the next 10 to 15 years in this country especially as AI improves and everyone can build products themselves and not have to raise millions and millions of dollars. For us, when we first started, we were like, 'We need to raise $2 million to build this.' Now if we raise $100,000, we can get by for a year."

AVC: "We're not the most extroverted people, but we understand that relationships matter and people matter. Having that sense of place and connection in any community is crucial. Post-pandemic we've seen an enormous shift in behavior — loneliness is really high, especially in Gen Z. We need tools to address that head-on that are not just effective but cool and fun."

Tell me the role of AI in your company's evolution.

RF: "The goal is to keep the company as lean as possible. AI writes 50% of our code right now."

Where does revenue come from at this point?

AVC: "Being consumer tech, it's not traditional to start making money off the top. We're trying to build a playground that's enough fun for people to come there, and then charge for premium stuff on the side."

What's premium?

RF: "Customizable profile, customizable circles. People to meet, places to go.

• Nobody has a proprietary data stream on what Gen Z or Gen Alpha do on a day-to-day business. That's important for any Fortune 500 company, or anyone training a large language model. And we can sell that data at a high level."
  

It seems like a lot of apps are trying to promote in-real-life stuff.

RF: "A lot of the dating apps are just dying because people are meeting at run clubs now. Dating apps are an entertainment thing. For us the big thing is: How do we reward people for actually going on a date with each other?

• Tinder can try to roll out a community product, but it's not going to be well received because they have a decade-plus of being known as a hook-up app."

How many users do you have now?

RF: "About 15,000 users."

Can you post photos on Hangtight?

AVC: "Users can't currently share photos on the home feed (by design) but they can share both photos and videos in the group messages and when DM'ing.

• We've been conditioned by Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to curate this persona online — that's led to a lot of false narratives about who we are and what we do.
• Our thesis is to give you tools to let you be you without the pressure to post the perfect picture you took 40 times in exchange for likes and constantly seeking approval."