Sion Abednego has bootstrapped Sanct Social on one thesis: close relationships can be the reason people keep using a social product. The Indonesian founder is building an advertising-free subscription business from Singapore, with the iPhone app live and more than 1,000 people already on the platform, and is now raising pre-seed capital to support product development and user growth, with Singapore as the first priority in the company’s go-to-market plan. The feature explains the loss that started the company, the three values the app follows, what early users do with it, and why he treats acquisition and retention as one question. His three-minute founder film is embedded below.
SINGAPORE – Sion Abednego is building Sanct Social around a commercial thesis rooted in personal experience: helping close friends and family understand one another can give a social product lasting value.
The Indonesian founder has bootstrapped Sanct Social from concept to a live iPhone app, on the App Store in Singapore, free with no ads. Mr Abednego is now raising pre-seed capital to support product development and user growth, with Singapore as the first priority in the company’s go-to-market plan.
His focus is retention through the interactions between people who already matter to one another. The business opportunity, as he sees it, is to make those relationships a recurring reason to use the product.
The experience that shaped the thesis
Mr Abednego started Sanct Social after losing a close friend. They were still messaging and calling, and she said she was okay. Looking back at her photos, songs and quotes, he felt he had missed what she was experiencing.
That experience gave him a specific problem to investigate. Staying in contact does not necessarily reveal how someone feels. A personal post may carry context that a conversation misses, while a friend may struggle to recognise or respond to it.
He began studying adoption, retention and user behaviour across consumer social products, and set his thinking down in a manifesto. The question guiding Sanct Social became what a product could do to help personal expression lead to understanding and a response from someone close.
The resulting product centres on three values: expressing feelings, understanding one another and being there for each other. The scope includes everyday companionship, celebrations and difficult periods.
Product judgement and execution
As a solo founder, Mr Abednego leads design, development and direct conversations with users. He has also presented Sanct Social at the Tech in Asia Conference in Singapore. AI development tools have let one person ship what used to take a team; the judgement stayed with him.
“AI took the cost out of building. It did not take the judgement out,” Mr Abednego said. “Every screen in Sanct Social is there because a close friendship needed it. Nothing is there because it was easy to add. That is what you get when one person owns the product end to end: a product with a point of view.”
Within the app, Sancty is a companion users can talk to about their day by text or voice, including feelings they find difficult to express. The Verse provides shared virtual spaces where friends can meet when they are apart. Feeling check-ins, conversation and shared time bring those experiences into the same platform, so each one serves a different point in an interaction, from making a feeling easier to communicate to spending time together afterwards.
Early adoption and the retention priority
More than 1,000 people are already on the platform. Mr Abednego says students have described using the check-ins during exam stress and meeting in the Verse before bed, and parents have expressed interest in understanding their children’s feelings and approaching conversations with more context.
Those accounts identify behaviours to evaluate over time. His retention priority is sustained participation within friend groups: whether the routines emerging among early users continue beyond initial adoption.
“Social apps have spent fifteen years optimising for strangers. I am building for the five people who would notice if you went quiet,” he said. “That is a smaller room, and it is the one people walk back into every night. Retention is not a number I chase. It is what happens when the right people are in the room, and the product gives them a reason to speak.”
Sanct Social uses a freemium model, with free access, optional Premium subscriptions and no advertising. Its monetisation depends on paid benefits providing enough additional value to convert free users into subscribers. The early user accounts describe product use; long-term retention and subscription demand are still to be tested.
Pre-seed capital for the next stage
The company is seeking its first outside capital through a pre-seed round, and Mr Abednego wants to connect with investors in Singapore who back consumer social platforms and AI. The capital sought would support the product and user growth across Southeast Asia.
“We took Sanct Social from an idea to a live product on our own money, and the people using it have shown us where it belongs,” he said. “The pre-seed is about pace. The capital goes into the product and into reaching more circles across Southeast Asia, starting here in Singapore.”
The personal loss shaped the problem he chose. His objective as a founder is to turn that insight into a product with sustained usage and a subscription business that holds.
Sanct Social is on the App Store in Singapore. An Android version is coming soon.
Sanct Social can be downloaded through https://sanct.social
This press release has also been published on VRITIMES
