We all know about social media apps like Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter). But did you know there’s one focused entirely on Canada?
Launched last year, the appropriately named Eh! is a Canadian social network focused on connecting local communities and keeping Canadian content, including user data, on Canadian soil. It hails from Jessica Glowacki, the co-founder and CEO of Vancouver Island-based startup Trailmix and a veteran of engineering and product leadership experience at Reddit and Lululemon. The last few weeks have been particularly notable for Eh!, having launched both a web version and paid Eh!+ membership that adds support for multiple accounts, exclusive badges, and early access to upcoming features.
MobileSyrup sat down with Glowacki to learn more about what inspired her to start Eh!, what actually goes into launching a social media platform, how it’s reached tens of thousands of Canadians organically and more.
I saw you have a background in working at Reddit and Lululemon. What inspired you to start Eh!, and did that prior experience help you do that?
Jessica Glowacki. (Image credit: TrailMix)
Jessica Glowacki: I’ve spent 27 years in technology. I started off as a engineer, moved into sort of more leadership roles, went to Lululemon for 11 years, and then moved over to Reddit. So I got this sort of combined experience of grassroots growth through Lululemon, and then I got to see how social media works behind the scenes. I spent some time in the ads space, and then some time working on bot detection. And last year, there was a big shift politically, and it just felt like the right time that we had our own [social media platform]. I mean, we probably could have done it years ago. [laughs]
But it just felt like that was something we could do. And with AI picking up, we were able to create a prototype very quickly. And that sort of led to “Okay, so let’s see if we can build a social media company.” [laughs] And here we are. For me, this is a passion project. This is something that I want to do to really help Canadians and really show our culture and just really bring people together.
You mentioned that AI helped. But in general, I think a lot of people probably wouldn’t even know where to begin when it comes to launching a social media app. In a larger sense, just how much work goes into that?
Glowacki: Yeah. The big unlock for me with AI was I’ve got a background in product management, so being able to put mock-ups together using AI and to really speed up that life cycle of building. So I’m able to put together really, really good mock-ups. Our engineers are able to build agents and stuff that can can build this code a lot quicker than you used to be able to — and test it, for that matter. And so our cycle, from idea to build, is way shorter than it would have been even a year ago.
And then just understanding that a lot of people can build right now because of AI. They can build these really quick ideas. But I think the differentiator for us was the grassroots marketing that we did on social media — being able to really gather people together and get them over. So on the day of launch, we had 1,000 people sign up right away due to some of the pre work we did. And then we’re up to about 30,000 users on the platform. And that’s all organic, no paid marketing.
That’s amazing, congrats on that. Obviously, with any kind of technical launch, there’s always some things to improve, things you can build on. Since then, how have you evolved the app?
Glowacki: Yeah, we really leaned on user feedback. We’ve got groups as part of our app, and so we’ve got official feedback groups where people can post what’s frustrating them, what’s going on. We got a lot of feedback at the beginning, and we were able to really refine our feed. And actually [this] week, we’re looking to roll out some really nice product improvements for groups and events, but a lot of that has been based on what users are telling us, what they’re frustrated with, what they like from other platforms.
In a larger sense, when you do a social network like this, there’s a lot of different ways you can approach it in terms of the different features and all of that. Feedback is part of it, but how did you decide the shape of what this was going to look like?
Glowacki: For me, I’m in a smaller town right now, and so I really got the sense of the community that gets built in local. And so we really are leaning on local communities. You can come in and you can talk to the world, and you can do things online. But we really want to connect people locally, give sort of events that they can attend, groups that they can go and attend in person. And so to give you an example, I’m here in Parksville, I want to find the local running group. I can go online, and I can find that group. And so it becomes more of a destination to find things, versus the typical sort of “doomscrolling” social media that we have. We wanted to make it useful. And so we’re able to surface these things locally and tie it to in person where we can. So we’ve got some future things that will allow us to do that.
You just launched the Eh!+ membership. What was the impetus behind that and how did you decide which features you wanted to include with it?
Glowacki: I really want to support creators and small businesses in Canada. So for me, that was super important without having them trying to figure out an algorithm to be seen. Take a musician that’s up and coming. I wanted to give them the ability, for a very small price, to be seen. So they can go and buy Eh+, they can tag themselves as a musician, and then they can be in the priority search and allow them to be discovered. And the same with small businesses. I was seeing a lot of small businesses online really struggling with their social media presence, and how do they even hit their local market if they’re a physical store or service. And so we really wanted to give them that unlock of having a second account, yes, because if they want to have a business and personal, but [also] the ability to self-identify. And then we’ll give them access to early access to features as they come up that might benefit them.
Something that I thought was neat was on your website, there’s this little live interactive map showing where users are at a given moment. And it’s really cool, because there’s just so many different people from all over, like in places you probably wouldn’t even expect, and maybe even some in the U.S. and other places. So I’m curious, from your perspective, are there any particularly fun demographics that surprised or stood out to you, like, ‘Oh, didn’t expect that many people in that town?’ or that sort of thing?
Glowacki: We actually had a funny a funny story. All of a sudden, we had a whole bunch of Dutch people on our site. And we couldn’t figure out why. And they would be like, “Shh, the Canadians are waking up, we don’t want to [wake them up.]” [laughs] And it turned out someone had found us and written an article in like a paper somewhere in the Netherlands, and all of a sudden there was all these people.
We also had a fun thing where Tod Maffin — who’s doing the healthcare infusion on the island and trying to get healthcare workers to come over and across Canada — posted on social media that he had been on our site and was promoting it, and he had mentioned to say, “Tod Maffin sent you.” And we have a chronological feed, and we had all these people coming in saying, “Tod Maffin sent me, Tod Maffin sent me.” So we actually did a giveaway of a t-shirt with him with an image that says, “Tod Maffin sent me.” Just to kind of celebrate and have fun with that, because we want this to be a fun site. We don’t want this to be something where you go on there and you get addicted to a lot of things. We want it to be fun.
This is an ongoing journey, but in the last several months, what are some of the biggest things that you’ve learned in terms of launching and running a social media platform?
Glowacki: Yeah, I think with anything, there are unexpected surprises. We’ve had a couple smaller sort of SMS attacks where we’ve had to say, “Okay, let’s rearrange the way our settings work.” Because we’re getting costs that come up with that. And it’s just getting people to come over. There’s a real sense of Canadian pride right now, and leaning on that. People are very happy to be in a space that is less elevated in intentions, given where we are right now. In a lot of posts that we’ve analyzed, it’s a lot of round photography and pets and things like that, which I think is great. And people come here for a bit more of a calmer space.
I love that point of wanting to support Canadians. Something that I do in my work is I cover a lot of video games, specifically, and a lot of people don’t realize just how big our industry is here. So I’m always trying to promote that. To that point, whether it’s that sort of work or Eh!, what else do you think we can do holistically — at the government level, individual level, that sort of thing — to better raise awareness of Canadian talent, Canadian businesses?
Glowacki: That’s an interesting one. I think just being able to get loud. What I’m finding on social media is actually there’s a rise in independent journalists and independent things, and really trying to support small businesses and small companies, small apps, things that are launching. We want to do whatever we can to support these Canadian companies, and so part of what we’re going to do is lean into that “Buy Canadian” [movement] and really just look for ways to surface this content and celebrate people across Canada that are doing amazing things. But I think we just have to get loud. [laughs]
How do you hope continue to support and grow Eh!, and where do you see it in the coming months and even years?
Glowacki: Right now, we want to partner with Canadian brands. We want to make sure that we are highlighting those sorts of things. We want to give back. My dream is to open an “Eh! Foundation” that would give back to communities that would really allow them to do community events, do in-person things because of where we’ve been with COVID, where we’ve been with all these things, and just get people back in-person and back to trusting and connecting and things like that.
This is our first launch of the platform, so we’re actually kind of tagging it as local social infrastructure. We want to eventually launch this in other countries and have that same sort of experience. So when you’re on the app right now, if you’re not from Canada, you just see your country. So you’re visiting Canada’s digital home and you’re checking things out, where you might want to go and talk to people. But we want to do this also in other areas, or even other verticals where we can do that. We’ve still got some work to do on things like language, Indigenous culture, really trying to blend all that stuff in a way that works for them. And so those things are going to become a priority pretty quickly here.
Eh! can be downloaded for free on Android and iOS. It’s also available on the web.
Image credit: TrailMix
