The Blue Fever app is an antidote to toxic social media: a space for self-care and community support. The app allows teens to release stress, safely share feelings, and anonymously relate to each other. Offering a safe and supportive alternative to the negativity and toxic content available on the most popular social media platforms, the app is focused on female-identifying Gen Zers, but open to and inclusive of everyone.
The Blue Fever app has a caring algorithm known as Blue, who recommends supportive, user-generated content based on each user’s feelings. Backed by Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Bumble Fund, and Techstars, Blue Fever is on a mission to mitigate online toxicity and encourage empathy by creating a new kind of platform: Emotional media, not social media.
“We’ve always had this desire to help people become their best, most confident selves. Especially in young women, you see the suicide rates rising, you see anxiety, depression, loneliness rising. We feel like if we can create the right tools, we can combat a lot of that and turn things around, so that young women can really take more control over their identity.”
Greta McAnany
CEO/Co-Founder, Blue Fever
Background
Blue Fever is evolving the teenage diary into a collaborative, non-toxic app where Gen Z can emotionally support each other without judgement. Using AI emotional guidance, Blue Fever is building a new kind of community platform centered around self-care called emotional media, not social media.
In the social media era, teens and young women are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects that stem from a constantly connected life. After a year and a half of the pandemic, Gen Z is exhausted mentally and emotionally from being on technology 24/7. Because of this, 64 percent are either taking a break from or quitting social media platforms because the content is too toxic and triggering and/or they are afraid of being “cancelled.” But Gen Z is not putting away their phones- they are searching for an antidote to social media- a platform for their inner selves.
“The user of the future focuses on safety and authenticity, so they need a new kind of online space where they can bring their full and unfiltered selves,” says Greta McAnany co-founder/CEO. “Growing up is hard no matter what. When I was a teen I wanted an older sister who I could confide in and get guidance from. Today’s teens also want the support of people, but they also want technology to support their journey of growing up.”
The Blue Fever mobile app is built to provide users with a space for: safe self expression, social support and positive guidance. Positive guidance comes from Blue, an empathy-powered AI that is built to listen to moods and life events and to share recommendations based on it’s own learned experiences.
The Blue AI is first and foremost anti-toxicity, it blocks bullying, trolling, and any other toxic content from appearing in the app. And can even nudge Blue Fever users to avoid accidentally triggering others or provide crisis resources to users to those who need them.
The Project
Tivix started the engagement with a kickoff workshop to align on the product vision and understand the user persona. We quickly caught on to the Blue Fever culture by embracing Big Sis energy and focusing on the unique needs of the Gen Z user base.
Tivix was Blue Fever’s technology partner for the engagement – providing guardrails and sharing best practices in building a mobile app MVP. With the onset of COVID-19 during the project, we have worked as a distributed team both on the client-side and internally, with plans to continue this relationship for the foreseeable future.
The collaboration included the Blue Fever team, Polyform Studio handling design, and a dedicated Tivix Scrum Team. We worked closely to understand Blue Fever’s vision for the MVP mobile app, giving feedback on the feasibility of Polyform’s designs, and estimating the development effort so that we could work towards a target release date. In 4 months, we were able to go from first introductions to releasing an MVP app for Blue Fever.
Once we aligned on how the teams would work together, we used agile development sprints to deliver features. Clubhouse was used as the centralized project management tool for tracking our workflow, user stories, and evolving priorities.
Once the MVP was launched, we shifted from a milestone-based working agreement to a month-to-month contract allowing the Blue Fever team to have full ownership of the product backlog. Blue Fever onboarded their own designers and product team to work on the product, defining and prioritizing work, with the Tivix team fully integrated to handle development and QA.
“The depth of the talent bench in Tivix has been invaluable; it not only gave my team access to proven product managers and developers, but the agility to quickly pivot to new resources as our needs shifted.”
Jason Aguilos
Head of Product
Outcome
The MVP mobile app is live and available on the App Store. The product is evolving as we learn and adapt to the needs of the Blue Fever user base. Since launch, we have helped the Blue Fever team to revise the product feature set, based on user behavior and feedback.
Blue, the conversational AI on which the product is based continues to learn and improve how its serves the needs of Blue Fever’s users as it deals with more interactions and emotional contexts.
Greta McAnany
