Find Serendipitous Connections as You Travel using Mozi app

Can this app Mozi Solve my problem of keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances when I travel?

Ever since I read the book “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi, I was constantly searching for a technical solution to help me keep in touch with people and set up meetings as I traveled around. I recently realized that while in Paris, I missed meeting with a friend from my Wine and Cheese club because I didn’t have time to monitor my socials.

I’ve evaluated many tech solutions over the years and just heard about a solution by the founder of Blogger, Twitter & Medium, Ev Williams.

The app is called Mozi. I just onboarded myself, and below I’m going to go through the onboarding and highlight some of the things I think this app has done well and maybe some improvements it could have.

The goal of this app is to allow you to know when your friends are traveling nearby and meet them in person. For people that travel a lot, especially around Asia to Singapore, Hong Kong, and China, I see its potential for having serendipitous meetings as you travel.

I’m actually part of a private entrepreneurship community called the Dynamite Circle that has a specific functionality built-in, and I’m usually updating where I’m traveling so I can meet with entrepreneurs that are a part of this community. It would be great if this functionality was expanded beyond this community, and that’s precisely what Mozi promises to do.

The app allows you to create trip plans and identifies when there are overlaps in your trips with your friends. You can also create local events for the city you’re in to meet with people. That’s a great use case, but I haven’t tested it because I don’t have enough friends on the app yet.

Technical Notes

The app is well-designed. The developers created what appears to be a native iPhone app and didn’t seem to use any cross-platform technologies to build it. Admirable. That allows it to be petite, about 42 MB in size. Great if you are in a networking situation and somebody needs to download the app to connect with you.

It’s more remarkably feature-rich than I would’ve expected for an app that was just released a few months ago. You can even subscribe to a calendar feed so that the trips you’ve entered in the app appear on your calendar, which is a great way to make sure that when you’re scheduling things, you have those trips visible.

Onboarding Experience

The onboarding is pretty well done and has many explanations of why you need the app. When signing up, it would be nice if I didn’t have to provide my mobile phone number and could use email instead. Some people may not want to provide a lot of personal information to this app if they just want to use it with very close friends.

This app harkens back to the old Web 2.0 apps during the social era when you could upload all your contacts, and that’s what it asks for — it prefers to slurp up your whole contact address book. I wasn’t so keen to do this, but if you do, you can then find any other people who are on this app and privately connect to all of them.

The App attempts to be a sort of CRM for your friends, so it asks for quite a few optional details to build your profile, which would be nice if it synced up from your default address book card. If you fill this out completely, you will have the superpower of knowing your acquaintance’s spouse and pets names.

On-Boarding Screen #1 of Mozi

On-Boarding Screen #2 of Mozi

On-Boarding Screen #3 of Mozi

On-Boarding Screen #4 of Mozi

Privacy & App Permissions Required

Be mindful before you share all your friends personal information with a 3rd party

The permissions the app asks for are access to all of your contacts and notifications. Later in the app, they will ask for access to your location in certain situations. I did find that if I said no to accessing all my contacts, I could still use the app. I could go into iOS settings and give only partial access and add only people that I wanted to add. Not only that, but I think you can set this up so that you don’t provide any access, and once you create your profile and trip plans, you can share links to those with other people. They can see those links and decide if they want to get connected with you on the app. You can probably use this without uploading your full address book and still get value.

Most of the “data” you have to manually enter, such as your trips. The app doesn’t use location services to alert people you are in the area. I speculate that this is because Mozi didn’t want people complaining about the app “tracking” you. However, this seems like a contradiction when the app is asking you to upload all your contacts, which is not advisable these days. Perhaps this approach is intentional, as Facebook has normalized the behavior of users sharing their friends’ personal information.

Another minor privacy issue is that even though more users are trying to get away from Meta properties and this app is a suitable alternative, it uses WhatsApp to verify your mobile number.

Trip Planning Features

Two types of plans exist a trip and a local plan.

Entering your travel plans is a bit of a chore as you have to do it manually. As someone who is used to forwarding flight itineraries to Flighty and TripIt, this seems like work. I wonder if I will remember to update this as much as I should, but I have put my future travel plans in the app already, and it’s allowed me to share a page of all my travel plans. It offers many built-in viral-type features that enable sharing links, so other people might want to join the app when they see these shared links. Helpful features like QR codes and profile page sharing help to spread the word and connect with other people.

Making plans and trips uses as few fields to fill out as possible, and it’s an easy process, so in the end it is not a big chore. The only thing that could be more useful would be the ability to enter these plans from my Mac, so a Mac version would probably be preferable when entering lots of travel plans.

Images of your destination are automatically chosen when you add a plan.

Potential Network Effects and Adoption

I think a big blocker will be getting the right percentage of your friend network on the app to make it a regular check-in. I’m not sure if it’s better to have around 30% of the people you know so you’re bumping into each other as you travel, or if it’s just good to have the core people you know that you’re really good friends with and make sure that you meet when you travel. Maybe both use cases are applicable.

In cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, I’m often traveling for business and out of the country, so I think this app makes a lot of sense. Many of the people I know from my Shenzhen days have dispersed around the world, and I want to make sure I reconnect with them as I travel. Throughout Asia, numerous people travel for conferences and exhibitions, and this app makes sense to stay connected. I currently use the app Flighty to track where my close friends are flying, but it’s not an extensive group of people, and I think this app could be better for a wider audience of friends and acquaintances.

Future Potential

There’s another app called Clay, which has kind of the flip side of this technology, where it can make sure your address book is always up-to-date with current information about your contacts. What I would love to see is a merge of Clay and Mozi to have the latest information on where people are, what they’re doing, and their contact information. You would have a very great personal CRM that would be worth paying for.

Currently, this app is free. They likely intend premium features you’d pay for, following Ev Williams’ strategy of initially offering something for free before monetizing it, like Medium.

Who Should Use Mozi

All in all, this is a full working app that allows you to find friends while traveling and if there’s a chance to meet with them when you’re in the same city. This is the kind of thing that hopefully helps build more in-person relationships, so this app is probably going to gain traction at the moment when many users are reconsidering their relationship with traditional social media. It takes a good spin on how to find somebody in the city and even keep your business travel connections warm. I tend to do that as I’m traveling—find who I should be talking to when I arrive in a city—so I think I’ll be using this app.

Reference

Download Mozi from the App Store

Mozi Launch Announcement on Medium

Similar web based app InTown