What is Lurve?
In early May, when spring was at its finest, Keér, Ellie, and I took a walk around our neighborhood. When we were six doors down from the home we own, Keér and I were on the sidewalk and something sparkly in the neighbor’s yard caught Ellie’s eye so she tried to get a closer look. She didn’t get far before a woman came roaring out of the house with her big dog barking loudly while she sneered, “Get off my property!” It scared us. We left quickly and then I realized what happened and decided to go back to speak with her. I told her that what she did wasn’t okay, that our child had trick-or-treated there several years in a row prior to that moment without a problem, and that I thought her outburst was based in racism. She chided me, insulted me, called me names, and confirmed my suspicions. When she said something about how I use essential oils to solve all my problems, I heard laughter from within the house. Ugly, cackling laughter. And those cackles echoed in my spirit as I went home.
The news of Ahumaud Arbery broke and those cackles came back to me. Then, the uprising from the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd took hold. Through a hedge, our daughter Raven overheard two White men deriding the Black Lives Matter movement. The conversation shook her, especially because one of the men had voiced support and had even attended a local BLM protest. She was just trying to walk our dog. Then, the neighbor across the street tried to tell me looting is the reason he was reluctant to get behind the movement as he saw me displaying my Uprising (power fist) art in our living room picture window. “Tried” is the operable word in that sentence, he got set straight, but my family stopped going on walks in our neighborhood. Consistently encountering a similar vibe online was socially devastating.
So, I fell silent for a while. May stretched into June and I was still silent. It was unlike me. I’m a social butterfly, right? Mom even called Keér to find out where the heck I had gone. I was fine. I was in my own little world rediscovering my love of music. If I was awake, I was definitely consuming music, maybe making art, and hardly speaking a word. COVID-19 meant my classes had all been cancelled so I didn’t really have any reason I absolutely had to talk to anyone, so I didn’t. The kids were like, “Um.. What’s up with mom?” They love music as much as I do and were enjoying the playlists pouring out of me, so they didn’t mind too much.
In my non-talking, musical world, I created a super inclusive club where everyone — action-word-loves — like me and dances with abandon and when I came to from my inner-world, I exclaimed, “Keér, I want to build a dance club.” Amused, but lacking judgement, he responded, “Um… Ebb, we’re in the middle of a pandemic.” Anyway, y’all know that didn’t stop me. As I dove deep in imagining my new, super inclusive dance club, where coincidentally, everyone was using American Sign Language to communicate, we saw a tweet by a friend and angel investor facilitator about how to create a thriving physical community in this new age of technology and it requires a bunch of steps starting with a virtual element. Keér and I wondered how we could implement our new concept… what, like put it in a Facebook Group? That seemed exactly opposite of what we were ultimately trying to achieve. Then, we looked at alternative social media platforms to bring our vision to fruition, but nothing out there could do it. So, we went back to square-one and imagined what a new social media platform, that felt like the right place for my loving dance club where everyone speaks ASL, might look like. And with an itty-bitty idea of a concept, we were used as guinea pigs to test a new business accelerator program called Change Makers.
Change Makers led us down the path of Lean Startup Methodology. We conducted surveys and wound up doing more than fifty in-depth interviews with people focusing on the things they love and hate about social media. Many of them were people we didn’t know before the interview. Well. People had lots of thoughts and feelings about social media, who would’ve thought?! We combined the feedback we got from the interviews with our original concept to create a solution to what became a clearly defined problem. We used Adobe to illustrate our vision in wireframes and developed a presentation to explain the solution to the people we did the original interviews with to see if we solved the problems they laid out for us. We began presenting the solution, and many people enthusiastically responded that we went above and beyond and in doing so, solved “The Social Dilemma.” We didn’t really understand what they meant until we finally sat down to watch the Netflix film. But, yeah, they were right!
So, at that point, Keér and I stopped to look at one another. Were we really going to try to build a social media platform that could compete with the likes of Facebook? And then we thought, if not us, then who? We decided to keep going which meant following the steps laid out in Change Makers, beginning with de-risking operations. That meant we needed to build a team. Roughly two months later, we have a fully developed team and we’ve started a/b testing our ideas. We incorporated as Lurve, Inc. on October 26th, 2020. We like to say that if Facebook’s algorithm is based on Fear, ours is based on Love.
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