While most social media incumbents have pivoted into focusing on creators and entertainment, Retro is a beautiful new photo sharing app with a focus on sharing with close friends and family. The experience is a breath of fresh air and our team has been loving it, so we had to take this as an opportunity to sit down with the Retro founders Nathan Sharp and Ryan Olson to learn more about their inspiration for the app and where it's going.
Hey Nathan & Ryan, who are you and where are you in the world right now?
We’re old teammates from Instagram, where we met when we started to work together on the project that eventually shipped as Instagram Stories. Nathan led product and Ryan led iOS engineering on IG Stories. We’d always wanted to start our own company together one day, and we finally left Meta in May 2022 to make that happen.
Right now, we’re working remotely from Boston & Aspen. Nathan’s based in SF, but he visits Boston every summer for a few weeks so his three girls (ages 6, 4, and 2) can hang with their grandparents. Ryan is in Aspen, where he moved during the pandemic to be closer to family and the outdoors.
Can you tell us a bit about how you got into building products and what lead you to focusing on consumer social?
Nathan: I had been interested in architecture, and later policy, as ways to create systems that encourage interactions that bring out the best in people. But social software became so much more appealing because you can build and understand impact in days versus years or even decades in architecture and policy.
Ryan: My first real exposure to building apps was an iOS internship at the news app Flipboard. It was an incredible group of people to learn from and really instilled an appreciation for design details and craft. I found many of the same values at Instagram along with very large and growing community. Consumer social is wild because you can be a team of a handful of people that builds a product that millions or even billions of people get to enjoy and use. It is still one of my favorite experiences to see friends, family, and strangers using things I’ve made out in the wild.
Can you share the origin story of the name Lone Palm Labs?
Ha - it’s named after our favorite bar in the Mission in San Francisco. Back in 2016, when we both lived in SF, Ryan and I used to meet up at Lone Palm with a bunch of other colleagues from Instagram. That’s where we used to dream up different approaches to problems in consumer social, so we thought it was fitting as the name for our parent company. We were so relieved to find that it was still there after Covid shut down so many businesses, and we still make a point to visit when we’re back together in SF.
Even though we’re all in on Retro for now, we have these grand ambitions of taking our product approach to other spaces, so we wanted to maintain this distinction between Lone Palm Labs as the parent company and Retro as our first product.
Who is the team behind Retro and what is your companies philosophy around building a founding team?
The full time team behind Retro today is deliberately small: Nathan and Ryan as co-founders, Peter Cottle on backend engineering, and Sean Leach on design. You sometimes hear that a team built something great despite being small - we think that teams most often build great things because they’re small (with strong talent, passion, and chemistry, of course). So our hiring approach thus far is hiring only people that are so talented they could have been co-founders in another sequence of events. We’re frugal as a company, but we have this principle of spending up on the things that matter, and best-in-class compensation for super talented people is one of those things that matters. So staying small makes sense there, too.
Consumer startups are often known for going through lots of product iterations and pivots before landing on something ‘sticky’. What was the path to this current iteration of Retro, and does it differ from what your team first set out to build?
When we left Meta in May 2022, Ryan and I knew that we wanted to eventually build a dedicated app for friends, but we spent the summer exploring a few ideas in different spaces (creator marketplaces, dating, recruiting) to make sure that we were landing on the very best first product for Lone Palm Labs. Then, in September, we looked across all we had explored and decided that, yeah, we were still most passionate about the friends use case. And we felt that among all our ideas, this was the one where the “why now?” question had the most apparent answer: all the incumbents have pivoted hard toward creators and entertainment, crowding out the friends and family use cases that we loved so much.
Once we committed to Retro, we’ve iterated a ton with the primary objective of comfort: comfort in sharing photos and videos, comfort in viewing, and comfort in responding to your friends’ content. Because this is a product that we first and foremost wanted for ourselves, we were able to decide, test, and evaluate really quickly because it was clear when something felt right. And if we were on the fence, the feedback from a small group of friends and family gave a sense of where to go next. All that said, the final system that we’ve landed on - a friends-only audience, with retroactive sharing from camera roll, content organized by week, private likes, a flexible post-to-see rule - is generally where we started in September. Our work has mostly been refining the cohesiveness and craft behind those key elements.
One thing I personally love about Retro is how the design and visual language of the app has a focus on content and respects me as a user — it’s simple, refined, and not condescending. In contrast so many photo sharing apps feel specifically targeted at teenagers with every piece of it gamified for growth and attention. Was this an intentional decision and how do you find the right product balance between attention and a calm experience?
I think one of the most important things for any team is to build something that’s authentic to you. Even outside of the issues that come with building a social product for a teenage audience, we as a founding team are not teenagers, so we’re not building for teenagers. We personally like apps that feel calm, comfortable, and enriching with each use, so that’s why we’re building one.
We were very intentional in building an app that respected the user’s narrow intention to catch up with friends and family. Early on, we talked a lot about what makes a behavior a habit that you regret versus a ritual that you feel good about, and at every fork in the road, we’ve made the decision to go the route that (we hope!) makes you feel good when you both open and close Retro.
It is an interesting question though: in 2023, can an a new app succeed without either gamification and the ability to seed content from commercially-driven creators? It’s a long shot, but we think so. We’ll see!
Congrats on launch day today — I know you’ll probably be responding to feedback for the next little bit, but is there anything exciting on the roadmap you can share for what’s next at Retro?
Tons. But I think we’re most excited about Retro for Android, a unique take on private messaging, and sharable recaps that you can export to other platforms like Instagram. We’re also very into print photography, but more on that later.
Give us a shout at hello@retro.app if you have any feedback, questions, or ideas. We love to hear from you.