Traditional social media sites are designed to keep us glued to our devices and our eyes glued to retinal feeds of memes and silly videos in order to create more engaging advertising platforms. But in recent years, a proliferation of companies have sought to capitalize on user burnout, encouraging users to engage in IRL experiences or offering products with non-addictive features such as endless scrolling.
Bond, which officially launched on Tuesday, is one such site. Bond co-founder and CEO Dino Becirovic says his site offers an AI-powered solution to Americans’ screen addiction.
This site works as follows. Just like on regular social media platforms, users post about what they’ve been up to lately. Bond allows users to update their profiles and post so-called “memories” through various mediums such as photos, videos, and audio files.
Unlike other sites, Bond is designed to serve as a kind of idea generation tool for users about what they do and should do in the real world.
The experiences stored within Bond feed the AI system, which is then trained on what kinds of personalized, event-based recommendations to make to the user, Becirovic said.
For example, if you keep posting about how much you love pho and haven’t had it in a while, Bond’s system might recommend nearby Vietnamese restaurants with good reviews. Or if you’re into heavy metal, Bond might point out that Iron Maiden are coming to your town next week.
The more you post about your experiences, Vesilovic says, the better the system will be able to provide recommendations.
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In other words, the system is designed to get users out of the app and back into the real world, allowing them to do more than just “rot the bed” or “doom scroll” as the kids say these days.
The layout is a bit similar to Instagram, although there’s no actual feed. Instead, user profiles appear in a kind of cluster formation. Click on a profile to see a user’s current story. Vesilovic said these stories disappear from your public profile after 24 hours, but are then saved to your private profile. Users can search their archive of memories at any time.
Bond’s team includes people who have previously built major social media apps such as TikTok, Twitter and Facebook, the company said. Becirovic previously worked at Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, while Bond founding researcher Arthur Bražinskas co-led user signal integration at Google Gemini.
What is the revenue stream for these companies? Most social media sites are just giant advertising vehicles, and that’s where most of their revenue comes from. Bond has no ads, so how does it make money?
Interestingly, Vesilovitch envisions a scenario where users could eventually license their data from Bond’s archives and sell it to companies who want to use it for AI training purposes. In this scenario, Bond would receive a small portion of profits through licensing fees, generating recurring revenue and positioning itself as a data provider to AI companies looking to tune their models.
“The idea behind this licensing model is that you can monetize your memories,” he said. “Once we have this platform with the right incentive structure that allows billions of people to create about their daily lives, it will naturally become a very attractive place for people who want to train on GPT 6 and 7 and all the other variations that are coming.”
In another scenario, Bond uses the accumulated data to serve as a product recommendation tool integrated with e-commerce sites. “Our users will opt-in to this experience, and if we can do this, we believe we can capture some value from merchant transactions by delivering a better user experience, driving conversions, and increasing throughput,” Becirovic told TechCrunch via email.
Besilovic said Bond will never sell users’ data for advertising purposes and that users can “delete memories by deleting them in the (Memories) tab or by using natural language in the Memories chat.” He added: “If users are not getting value from Bond, they can also delete their profile. As the product grows, we will introduce more privacy controls to give users more control over their data.”
Vesilovitch said that Bond will improve its encryption over time, but was a little vague about the platform’s current protections. “E2EE encryption is a priority for us in the near future after launch. In the meantime, we are storing all user data securely in our database and ensuring it is protected.”
For now, Vesilovitch seems primarily focused on making Bond cool. “Monetization is not a short-term priority,” he said. “Our initial focus is to create an application that allows users to get more value the more memories they capture.”
