Francesco Vitali will be the first to admit that when his co-founder Chris Siametis first approached him about Rent a Cyber Friend, he didn’t quite understand what it was about.
“Who will pay someone to talk to me?” Vitali told TechCrunch. “But Chris insisted. Chris is a millennial and I’m Gen X, so it wasn’t easy for me to understand his vision.”
Vitali worked with Siametis for roughly two many years; they ran 48FILMsome international short film festival (Vitali is also a film producer). So he took a leap of religion and trusted his co-worker with an idea he couldn’t resist: a video chat platform where people can pay per minute to chat casually with an “internet friend.”
Rent a Cyber Friend has grown to 3 million registered users without raising enterprise capital or spending money on marketing. The company doesn’t even have social media because it doesn’t have enough staff to allocate resources to it. The startup is a part of Startup Battlefield and will be featured at TechCrunch Disrupt later this month in San Francisco.
The company’s rapid growth showed that Vitali’s initial reactions were flawed, but as he began using the product himself, he began to realize that there was a large market for human-to-human communication — especially in an age when people were paying to talk to AI bots.
“Loneliness is the biggest disease in the world today,” Vitali said. “Millions are lonely, unemployed or looking for purpose. That’s why we built a platform where human time becomes valuable again and a place where being human is important.”
Cyber friends are first checked for their identity and then can set a rate per minute to talk; the platform retains 20% of this fee. People don’t just pay for company. Some cyber friends charge a higher rate if they are scientists or proven experts in a particular field, or if they speak a specific language that the user would really like to practice.
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For any social media platform — especially one that connects people through real-time video chats — security and content moderation is a challenge. Vitali notes that the platform has a block feature, but as the company continues to grow, it will need to proceed investing in maintaining a healthy environment. He said the next stage of product development could be a more robust and efficient system to enable faster and more accurate screening of potential cyber friends.
The turning point in Vitali’s life got here shortly after launching the company, when he made contact with a 19-year-old from China. He noticed that this person was one of the site’s most energetic users and spent $200 a day talking to people. Vitali rigged the site so that he was the only available cyberfriend and took the opportunity to ask the user about his experience without disclosing that he had began a company.
“He said, ‘I don’t feel safe going to the mall and meeting strangers, but this site gives me the opportunity to exchange cultures and meet people from all over the world,’ and that’s when I first realized we had something here,” Vitali recalled.
He still believes that the bonds people form in person are irreplaceable. But on an web where people are drawn into addictive or dangerous connections with AI chatbots designed to maximize engagement, this step towards humanity means something to him.