Buddy Up is a diary and journal service for users in their teens or early twenties. Unlike other diary services, Buddy Up offers a more gamified service that leads to fun and unexpected excitement when using.
Last week we told you about the Korean startup WePlanet’s STEP Journal. This week we give you another Korean made diary/journal service but with a different twist. The key differentiator of Buddy Up from their competitors is that users can savor the real excitement of "sociality" as well as being assured of a high level of privacy. Buddy Up feature a leaderboard of friends, and when you sozialize with your friends you ”buddy up” through a unique ranking system. Buddy Up helps you to easily see who you spend time with and you you don’t. That way Jellycoaster wants to help you reconnect with people you have lost touch with and expand and build your relationships and connections with others.

According to Jellycoaster, their service is more personal than Facebook and more open than Path. By concentrating on a fairly narrow market Buddy Up is able to more directly target the needs of their users, and a visual UI and UX ensures that their young users are kept duly entertained and engaged. In-app infographics on ‘buddies’ also helps to keep users locked in and interested in their networks. In terms of the competitive environment Buddy Up believe that their service fits into a lucrative niche between Facebook, which they feel is losing its focus on being a social network and is too broad for today’s social users, and Path, which is a very closed network. Although on the surface the service seems to be purely B2C, the company plans to monetize its B2B model, by offering large companies accounts with which to communicate with consumers using in-app rewards as motivation to engage, something other Korean applications have used to perfection, for example KakaoTalk. It remains to be seen if Buddy Up can differentiate themselves from the rest of the journal and diary market but a gamification strategy looks like a smart move from Jellycoaster.

More about this article series
The KAPP article series will cover each of the 20 startups that took part in the KAPP Global Hub Program, which took Korean startups to two global startuphubs, and is followed with a series of targeted workshops to ensure that the relationships and experience gained during the overseas trips was fully leveraged. 10 startups went to Singapore to discover the South East Asian markets, build partner relationships and gain investment for global growth. The other 10 companies went to Israel to engage with, and learn from, experts in one of the World’s most prolific high-tech centres.

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