Proposal: Import phonebook contacts into New Expensify
Strategy
The most important metric we want to see grow in the coming months is new user acquisition 📈. To facilitate that we need to invest in features that streamline viral user growth and make it easier to pull new users into the app. 👥
Problem
If you want to use the Expensify Classic app to invite your team or your boss to Expensify, it’s very easy. You sign up, scan a receipt, and an inbox task will appear asking who you want to send it to. If you click on that, it will open your phone’s contact book and allow you to select the contact(s) that you want to invite to Expensify. You can invite people you know in just a few taps, without leaving the app.
There are a number of other places throughout Expensify Classic where you can easily invite people to Expensify, such as when submitting reports.
Meanwhile, in New Expensify, the first few steps of inviting new users are arguably more streamlined. You immediately scan a receipt, and on the very next page you’ll be asked who you want to share it with. However, at that stage, you need to leave the app to find their email or phone number from some other source and manually type or copy/paste it into NewDot. This introduces friction in a critical viral growth moment.
Solution
Let’s close the gap on one of the final pieces of feature parity between Expensify Classic (mobile) and NewDot, by importing contacts from your phonebook 📕 into New Expensify. This will streamline the process of inviting people you already know into Expensify. Let’s show these imported contacts in any page where we invite new users (start chat, workspace invite, request money participants page, etc…).
All these pages are already set up to invite new users to Expensify via their email or phone number, so the only requirement is to import that information from the contacts app (after obtaining the user’s permission to do so). Because of that, this project is completely front-end and self-contained. That means that after we get through an initial high-level design phase, it can be implemented entirely by external contributors.
For UI inspiration, WhatsApp 📞 shows imported contacts in an “Invite to WhatsApp” section.
Issue Owner
Current Issue Owner: @perunt
Proposal: Import phonebook contacts into New Expensify
Strategy
The most important metric we want to see grow in the coming months is new user acquisition 📈. To facilitate that we need to invest in features that streamline viral user growth and make it easier to pull new users into the app. 👥
Problem
If you want to use the Expensify Classic app to invite your team or your boss to Expensify, it’s very easy. You sign up, scan a receipt, and an inbox task will appear asking who you want to send it to. If you click on that, it will open your phone’s contact book and allow you to select the contact(s) that you want to invite to Expensify. You can invite people you know in just a few taps, without leaving the app.
There are a number of other places throughout Expensify Classic where you can easily invite people to Expensify, such as when submitting reports.
Meanwhile, in New Expensify, the first few steps of inviting new users are arguably more streamlined. You immediately scan a receipt, and on the very next page you’ll be asked who you want to share it with. However, at that stage, you need to leave the app to find their email or phone number from some other source and manually type or copy/paste it into NewDot. This introduces friction in a critical viral growth moment.
Solution
Let’s close the gap on one of the final pieces of feature parity between Expensify Classic (mobile) and NewDot, by importing contacts from your phonebook 📕 into New Expensify. This will streamline the process of inviting people you already know into Expensify. Let’s show these imported contacts in any page where we invite new users (start chat, workspace invite, request money participants page, etc…).
All these pages are already set up to invite new users to Expensify via their email or phone number, so the only requirement is to import that information from the contacts app (after obtaining the user’s permission to do so). Because of that, this project is completely front-end and self-contained. That means that after we get through an initial high-level design phase, it can be implemented entirely by external contributors.
For UI inspiration, WhatsApp 📞 shows imported contacts in an “Invite to WhatsApp” section.
Issue Owner
Current Issue Owner: @perunt