Allow Me to Introduce My New Anti-Phubbing App Company

When nobody knows what to talk about, silence sets in. You know the feeling. Someone might fidget. Another person might hum and look away. Another person might excuse themselves “to use the bathroom.”

Phubbing(phone snubbing) is the act of snubbing someone in a social setting by looking at your phone instead of paying attention.

We quickly noticed that every conversation starter app had at least one of four problems: 

• They were poorly designed . Clashing colors. Mismatched fonts. Crowded spacing. Typos, misspellings, and a non-intuitive user interface. 
• Boring, Close-Ended, or juvenile, the questions were Dodgy and Dismissible.
• Repeated questions from a small library.
• Many of the Apps are old and abandoned. The founders built a questions App because it’s simple and easy.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I hosted a weekly small group of friends at our one-bedroom apartment in Tennessee. To get everyone on the same page, we started out with a single question. It ranged from deep questions, such as: “what makes you feel most alive?” to fun questions, such as: “if you could snap your fingers and something appeared every time, and you couldn’t pick money, what would you choose?”. 

• The founder of Partyqs says he uses party Qs with his girlfriend when we’re long distance.
• One user visits his friends in prison and plays Party Qs to talk about something other than prison stuff. 
• A school teacher loves asking her class of middle schoolers a couple of Party Qs before class. 
• A megachurch youth pastor starts off the weekly youth group with an ice breaker from Party Qs. Party Qs is actually on the printed schedule. 
• Another user spends time with his 12-year-old cousin and uses Party Qs to go beyond the usual “How are you”, “How is school” questions.