Good point about Meetup being purchased by WeWork. Doesn't seem that there's much innovation going on there rn...
We've asked our members why they join us and not Meetup or Facebook groups or other things that are out there. We hear two main answers: 1) there is a lot more trust/safety from this being a group just for women of this age, 2) Revel feels like more of a community, whereas on Meetup so much of the organizational burden falls on the group's one host.
We definitely believe that all of our members are more than competent. Apologies if the tone of our pitch suggested otherwise! We're also aware that the mere fact that someone is a woman over 50 does not make her automatically someone who's interested in Revel. The demographic is a huge and heterogeneous group and Revel serves a need for some who are craving the company of their age group of women.
Will definitely contact Jeff Johnson -- thank you for the tip!
A small suggestion to help with marketing is to make your mothers the face of the company. Right now it appears as if you are doing this for your helpless mothers rather than with your awesome mothers. I am not sure how involved they are but mothers should be on the About page.
Thank you so much for this feedback. It's really helpful for us to know. If there are other easy things we could do to boost accessibility, please lmk.
If you haven't checked them out yet, the accessibility tools in Google Chrome's Lighthouse[1] audits were absurdly helpful to me when I had to do an accessibility audit on a recent marketing site. They're not totally exhaustive, but it's certainly a fantastic start and would have at least helped you catch low hanging fruit like contrast.
This is kind of a nit-pick, but aside from what others have mentioned, your font for large and bold text (e.g. "As a woman over fifty...") is hard to read (and my vision is good). I'd suggest something clean, straight, sans-serif, and easily recognizable. Helvetica is probably a safe bet, though I'm certainly not a designer and am approaching more from a standpoint of legibility than usability.
It's hard to answer why 50 and why women as separate questions because it's really the confluence of age and gender that makes our problem statement unique. We did a lot of user research with women of this age. We heard a consistent story: as she ages, she feels more and more invisible to society. Women with grey hair become less powerful; men tend to become more so. At the same time, though, she herself is feeling stronger and more comfortable in her own skin and "gives less f" than she ever has before. And so our goal in building Revel is to build a space where we can celebrate the power and strength that comes from being a woman of this age.
Curious: why women and not men? I understand why not both. But isn't this -- empirically -- a much worse problem for men?
I know my dad never really had any friends. Luckily, he has 6 brothers and they're kind of close, so that's a decent substitute for friends. But only one of them has any friends. My mom has one brother. He never had any friends -- ever, even as a kid.
On the contrast, my mom has tons of friends. Her 3 sisters have WAY more friends than her. My dad's sisters all have tons of friends. My mom's female friends have tons of friends, too.
I personally don't know any older women who don't have friends. Even my Grandma who was 90 when she died had two friends left around her age! I get the irony here, btw -- if they didn't have friends how would I know them?
Anyway, I could see women wanting more connection with women their age. Who doesn't want more friends? But beside one of my uncles, I literally don't know a single man in that age group that has ANY friends -- regardless of age. And even he only has a few friends, and he's genuinely one of the coolest people I know. It's sad.
Sample size of one. I get it. I know you did your research. Just curious to learn more.
My suspicion is: women might just be more receptive to this kind of thing (which is the reason they actually need it less) because they're a lot more social than men. But I'd like to get your input.
We've asked our members why they join us and not Meetup or Facebook groups or other things that are out there. We hear two main answers: 1) there is a lot more trust/safety from this being a group just for women of this age, 2) Revel feels like more of a community, whereas on Meetup so much of the organizational burden falls on the group's one host.