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- WE HAVE A NAME!🥁🥁🥁
WE HAVE A NAME!🥁🥁🥁
The app's official name is officially announced. Progress updates on the MVP. How to help. And can AI facilitate productive conversations?
Chiara Burns
March 07, 2025
In partnership with
Newsletter 006
Contents:
Hello beautiful collective,
Here we are. Over 1,000 name submissions later. Four tabs across a spreadsheet. Distilled down to 115 options based on viability. Put to a broad vote. Knockout research on the top five. And it just so happened that the one without trademarks or SERP issues was the one that had the greatest percentage vote.
Nearly 60% of the vote across 115 options.
How’s that for a democratic process?
We give to you…🥁🥁🥁
Thank you Kelly Worthen for the name, and thank you to everyone who voted!
This name truly captures the heart of what we’re building: A social platform owned by the people. No corporate overlords, no sneaky agendas. Just you, me, and all of our neighbors.
A good name should be polysemous, meaning it carries multiple layers of meaning. TAO is a meaningful acronym, but it also alludes to Taoism, which is deeply rooted in harmony and interconnectedness.
And here’s an interesting note—@edebreo on TikTok pointed out that “Tao” means “human” or “person” in Tagalog.
Needless to say, you all chose really well.
And THAT is the power of crowdsourcing. Consider this an early demonstration of how a collective can land on excellent solutions.
So… let’s do it again?
Up next: Visual Branding.
📌 Drop your best ideas in this thread for TAO Social’s visual branding.
📌 We’ll take inspiration and have designers explore ~3 directions. (🙋 P.S., if you’re a brand designer…reply to this email with a link to your portfolio.)
📌 We’ll put it to a vote—again.
Let’s make something iconic. The team has been swirling around ideas of yin-yang but with two hands, analemmas, turtles, and more!
The Tao produces unity.
Unity splits into two.
Two gives birth to three.
Three produces everything.
Everything carries Yin and embraces Yang.
Yin and Yang work together to create harmony.
Every time a unique user (meaning you can only do this once) clicks on the ad below, we get a small kickback of $1-$2. It costs you nothing — just a tap of the index finger to help cover our expenses.
The 200+ of you who do this every week have actually covered the cost of our incorporation and trademarking (and we’re fortunate that @mattdearden49 was willing to do much of this pro bono).
What we’d love to put funds toward next is additional, specialized legal help with figuring out how to potentially layer in a trust to make TAO maximally unfuckwithable.
There’s a reason 400,000 professionals read this daily.
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Research Roundup & Big Thanks!
Huge shoutout to Kasarra and the Design Team for leading some seriously impressive research.
Participants were so engaged that they spent over an hour giving thoughtful responses when the survey was supposed to take half that. That level of enthusiasm is everything.
We’ll be breaking it all down in a detailed Substack article (and maybe even sharing some of the video responses) coming soon. Stay tuned.
MVP Progress: The State of the Union
We’re making progress, and here’s what’s happening behind the scenes:
Seamless scrolling video is fully functional, though we’re refining haptics and fixing a slight flicker between thumbnails and video play.
Likes & comments are fully working.
Feed & content recommendation algorithm is our current focus—we’re actively developing this.
Design improvements (aka making it look 🔥) are in progress.
In-app video editing is a work in progress. The MVP will include basic functionality (create, clip, text overlay), while we evaluate whether to build a full editing suite or integrate an existing solution.
Right now, the ideal solution for that last bulletpoint would be a $3K/month SDK that would give us built-in video editing, filters, and a music library—but it’s not in the budget at present. So, we’re exploring other ways to include basic in-app editing for the moment.
This weekend, we’re running a mini hackathon with our dev team to push forward on these issues.
We’re still tracking for an MVP/Beta launch in April, but we’ll have a clearer timeline after this sprint.
@humanexperienced Replying to @Benjamin Kedwards995 TAO Social, formerly PeopleTok, is still on track for April as far as a beta :) Also please excuse the ... See more
How to Help + Crowdfunding
To bring TAO Social to life, we need as many people as possible to rally behind this vision. The biggest way you can help? Spread the word.
Here’s how:
Forward this letter to anyone you think would be interested.
Tag influencers or startups on TikTok who align with what we’re building.
Word of mouth is everything—talk about it, share it, ignite the fire.
@humanexperienced PeopleTok, soon to be renamed!
Keep an eye out for volunteer opportunities in this newsletter and on Reddit. You’ll see the volunteer emoji when those arise. 🙋 And if you have ideas? Drop them in the Reddit. This is the power of collective action and crowdsourcing in motion.
We’re also hammering out the Creator Recruitment Program. If you have connections or are great at cold outreach, this is something to watch. There will be opportunities here, and potentially rewards for those who step up.
Getting people on board is the key to unlocking bigger and bigger numbers. To successfully fund TAO Social, this needs to be more than a social media app.
It needs to be a social movement!
Could AI Facilitate Productive, Meaningful Conversations?
How do we get people out of the echo chambers and onto the bridges? We’re thinking out of the box here. I’ll let the video do the talking on this one.
@humanexperienced Replying to @user6849168820829 Thank you for being the perfect example. Class dismissed. @The Intelligence Agents #greenscreen
And btw, I am encouraging our wonderful team to start posting so it’s not always my face up here! The TAO Social official account is @byclearlightstudios on TikTok.
e pluribus unum,
Chiara Scuro