Illustration by Sarah Barton, sourced from Thinkstock
Shawn Boyer spent long hours in the summer of 2000 trying to convince business executives that people were really online.
That wasn’t an easy sale in a world before smartphones, Facebook and the death of dial-up internet. In May of that year, the now 46-year-old Richmond resident had just launched the website Snagajob, aimed at helping hourly employees find work. But he did this at a time when doubts still remained about whether the internet was the next big thing.
“We were very much convinced it was the future,” Boyer says. “Even at that time, you could already start to see momentum there. It felt like every day you were reading about someone who left their job who started a web company.”
It all started in 1998, when Boyer was helping a friend find a job on the internet, and he noticed that no job-search sites catered to people looking for hourly work. So he started collecting money from his first investors — family and friends — to create such a site. Today, Snagajob has more than 500 employees and has registered more than 80 million hourly workers in 300,000 locations.
Turns out people did get online after all.
In 2013, Boyer stepped down as CEO of Snagajob to pass the reins to someone who had more experience running a large company. While he remains a shareholder, he isn’t sitting idly by. Instead, he’s working on an app called goHappy.
Its mission statement, “To help people live happier lives,” is straightforward. The free app has some of the features of a typical social media app: You can share photos and chat privately. But its defining feature lets users find events going on around them and share that information with family and friends. The app then lets them vote and determine a time when they can all participate in that particular event or activity.
They can also integrate their calendar to help find available times and manage RSVPs in one place.
“The initial idea was born out of a time in my life, around 2005, when all I did was work,” Boyer says. “I became one-dimensional, and I tried to become more balanced. But that became a clunky exercise.”
Nick Jester started working at Snagajob in 2005 and followed Boyer to start goHappy as its vice president for product management in 2015. He said the venture is targeting busy people who typically want to spend more time with those they love but often find such endeavors difficult to plan.
What originally began as an idea for a goal-setting app turned into something else after Jester and Boyer spent hours with focus groups. “As we continued talking to people, it kept turning into, ‘I wish I had more time to spend with my significant other, or my kids, or my friends,’ ” says Jester.
He noted the irony in the fact that people are feeling more lonely at a time when social media networks have helped people build connections. “People are digitally connected, but they’re not authentically connected.”
The strength of core relationships is a leading indicator of happiness, Jester says. That’s what is at the core of goHappy — a tool aimed at helping people build relationships.
The purpose, to get people off the app and spending time with the people they care about, seems counterintuitive as a business idea, especially in a world in which tech companies deliberately program apps to encourage users to spend as much time on them as possible.
The app is new, but the debate surrounding whether digital technology makes us sadder is not.
Boyer will take up the topic at the annual South by Southwest Conference in March in Austin, Texas. The panel, “Not Only the Lonely: How We Can All Live Happier Lives,” was initiated by the goHappy team and selected in an online vote from a pool of more than 5,600 submissions. It will focus on the role of technology in creating social isolation.
Amy Blankson, who will take part in the panel, is the co-founder of the psychology consulting firm GoodThink and the bestselling author of “The Future of Happiness.” She says technology can have a positive influence on people’s lives if used in the right way.
“The Ancient Greeks defined happiness as ‘the joy we feel striving after our potential,’ ” Blankson says. “To that end, I think technology is an amazing tool for helping us to gain real insight into how we can become our best, most balanced selves.”
Jester contends that people want to use their devices toward different, more self-fulfilling ends. This is why he thinks goHappy has a lot of potential as not only a tool to improve lives, but also an innovation.
”There’s such a huge business opportunity in getting people to go out and do things,” Jester says. “If people are continuing to see value, we’ll continue to see growth.”
If Boyer thinks the digital world can help people to be happy, it’s probably because he caught wind of that potential at Snagajob.
Boyer recalls the tale of one woman in Southern California who had been in and out of juvenile detention since the age of 14. She described finding work through the job-search site as the first time in her life she felt a sense of self-confidence. Another woman who feared she wouldn’t be able to afford a Christmas gift for her children ended up finding work at Toys R Us.
Stories like these speak to the common denominator between Snagajob and goHappy, says Boyer — helping users improve their lives for the better: “Starting the company would have been worth it just for that.”
