Hello from Avail
Avail is a small app for spontaneous connection with people you already know. Sometimes you're free for a coffee, a walk, or a call, and you want your friends to know about it. That's the entire app.
Here's how it works. You broadcast an "avail" (a short note saying you're around) to friends you choose. The friends you send it to never see each other. If someone wants to take you up on it, they reply, and it becomes a normal one-on-one conversation. No group thread to wrangle, no string of one-off texts to send. Just an easy way to make a real-life hangout happen.
It works for travel too. Say you're in another city for the weekend and want to put the word out that you're in town. Avails have a broadcast radius, so you can send to everyone you know and only the folks near you will see it.
Just as important is what Avail doesn't do. There's no infinite scroll, no likes, and no public forums for anonymous commentary. Those features have a way of taking more than they give. (The documentary The Social Dilemma is a good place to start on that.) Avail keeps the good part of social software and leaves the rest behind.
We first built Avail in 2023. This year we're rebuilding it from scratch: new stack, same idea, sanded down to the parts that worked. The web app is live now at app.avail-broadcaster.com, and the iOS app is on its way to the App Store in the US and Canada.
This blog is where we'll document the road there. If that sounds interesting, subscribe to the RSS feed. That's the whole distribution strategy for now.
Let your favorite people know you're around.