Say you’re planning a family reunion. At first Facebook seems like a good option to reach your family.

But your great aunt isn’t on Facebook, and your cousins in college aren’t really using it either. Keeping everyone informed and on the same page can be tricky.

A Des Moines-based startup is looking to simplify the process of doing things IRL with a new app, Hang. The app’s creators are looking to enhance real life, rather than adding another distraction to it.

How Hang works

Users of the app can post a Hang, letting people know when and where an event is happening. Invitees get a push notification, letting them know the details of the event. It might be the aforementioned family reunion, or friends looking to go to a movie or get together to study.

Once someone invited joins a Hang, they can invite other friends. You don’t need to have the Hang app to be invited to a Hang or even join one. Hang accesses your phone’s contacts, so as long as the people you want to invite to your event have a cell phone, they can get the info. Your Facebook-less great aunt and cousins can still get an invite to the family reunion.

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“At our base, we’re a messenger app,” said Hang co-founder Dalton Viggers, “But the real goal is to make it easier for people to get together and make plans.”

Hang launched in May, with the free app available for iPhone and Android.

Figuring out what users want

Viggers said that when Hang launched, the team made some assumptions about what users would want, but didn’t really test them out. Initially, there were two different kinds of Hang: joinable hangs – the events you were trying to connect friends with – and normal hangs, which were essentially status updates.

“It was confusing people, because they didn’t always realize if they were making a normal Hang or a joinable one,” Viggers said. “If something was created as a normal Hang, the features weren’t there to make it a joinable Hang. We realized the status updates weren’t important, so we got rid of them. That helped simplify the app.”

Accelerated success

Hang was recently named as one of six teams in the Iowa Startup Accelerator’s 2016 class. Hang is still a new app, and Viggers and his team want to perfect it with the support of an accelerator.

“We’re working hard on Hang, but we wanted some structure and mentorship,” Viggers said. “We try to be honest in admitting that we don’t know everything. We really liked their focus on being agile and having weekly sprints, as well as having a smaller focus. We’re not just one of a number of teams.”

CTO Austin Benson also liked the fact that the Iowa Startup Accelerator is based in Cedar Rapids, his hometown.

“I grew up in Cedar Rapids, and before I left for college there was nothing like this here,” Benson said. “It’s nice to come back and see how much the startup community has grown in my hometown.”

Dalton and his team haven’t been actively pushing Hang yet, but so far the majority of their users have come from college campuses. Eventually they hope it will expand beyond the academic world, but for now college students make for good early adopters.

Taking the focus off phones

The big goal is to have Hang in everyone’s phone, but for users to spend less time staring at their social media feeds and to get out into the world.

“Instead of using this tech passively, we want people to use it to improve their interactions with other human beings,” Benson said. “Getting off the phone and being a more active society should be the goal. Hopefully Hang can nudge people in that direction.”

“We want to provide answers when people ask, ‘What should I do?’,” Viggers said. “We help you find out what your friends are doing, then you can go hang.”

Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Hang as a Cedar Rapids-based company.

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Joe Lawler is a freelance reporter based in Des Moines.