Founder of park.io acquired friendster.com for ~$30k and shipped an iOS social app where the only way to add friends is physically tapping phones together.
Key Takeaways
The domain sold at a gname.com expired-auction for $7,456; the founder then bought it for $20k Bitcoin plus a domain earning ~$9k/year in ad revenue.
Apple rejected the first build under Guideline 4.2 (Minimum Functionality) for being too niche; signup is now open but phone-tap is still the only way to connect.
App Store review took one to two months; Friendster is now live on iOS.
“Fading connections” softens friendship links after one year without a physical phone tap, framed as a nudge toward in-person contact, not a penalty.
Friends-of-friends visibility is designed to surface people worth meeting in real life, not to grow a feed.
Hacker News Comment Review
The $30k headline doesn’t hold up to arithmetic: $20k Bitcoin plus a domain valued at ~$9k/year in ad revenue isn’t obviously $30k, and commenters noticed the fuzzy accounting immediately.
App Store discoverability is already a problem: search for “Friendster” surfaces sponsored results, Instagram, Tinder, and unrelated apps before the actual app appears.
The phone-tap mechanic drew the sharpest pushback: iOS-only NFC locks out Android, the decay feature has painful edge cases (deceased contacts), and the friction that feels wholesome in theory may just cap the addressable user base at people who already meet in person regularly.
Notable Comments
@NikolaosC: “filters out 90% of the people who’d actually use a social network” – clean one-line diagnosis of the retention ceiling.
@chr15m: proposed concrete alternative stack: QR code instead of tap, PWA to skip App Store, Nostr relay for backend to cut infrastructure cost.
@Zeebrommer: pointed out the gap that let this auction slip through – no reliable “notify me when domain X is for sale” service exists for platforms like gname.com.
