folsom

Connect soulularly

Health

Community

hey product hunt! 🛸 i’m shaw, co-founder and ceo at folsom. i’m sitting next to my two co-founders alex and evan. esa sends their regards ;). today, we are super excited to launch folsom, your digital tool for building soulular connection with the the people you love. ☄️ alex, evan, and i have been working tirelessly the past few months with a core group of folsom users and finally feel ready (gulp) to share folsom with the product hunt community. 🪐 you’ve probably heard that we’re living in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. in the us, roughly one in two people is lonely. what’s more - loneliness has a profound effect on one’s physiological health: being lonely is as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. loneliness increases your mortality rate, makes you more likely to get the flu, and harms your cardiovascular health. we want to help mitigate loneliness and it’s impact. 👩‍🚀 ok, so what does folsom actually do? when you open folsom, you’re asked “how are you feeling?” this is not an opportunity to flex or to share a perfunctory photo of the same salad you eat everyday for lunch, but instead a chance to go a layer deeper. to share vulnerably with your friends. vulnerability is a key ingredient in building connection, and we want to help facilitate it. we use ai to help you identify feelings and to generate images that help you reflect them. 🔭 we’ve heard that folsom provides the friend content you don’t get anywhere else. on folsom, there are friend insights and revelations usually reserved for the lamentably infrequent conversations when a bold friend demands to know, “how you’re really doing.” on folsom, you get a peek into your friends’ hearts. 🥹 once you share a feeling, you land on a feed of your friends’ feelings. you can comment on feelings and react using cached affirmations. there are no like buttons or follower counts. browsing the folsom feed has catalyzed countless phone calls, the occasional venmo for drinks in a friends honor, and a handful of happy tears. 🔮 if “how are you feeling” feels like too big of a question, there are other prompts available to get the vulnerability juices flowing. you can also send love to friends - remember those happy tears i mentioned? 🫂 folsom has become a core part of our lives. it’s how we keep up with friends and family (shoutout to my mom for being an early adopter). we hope you’ll use it. we hope you’ll love it. we hope to support you on your soulular journey. thanks for supporting us on ours.