Two weeks ago, Ryan Friedman, a 24 year old developer on the west coast (Santa Monica), posted “The App Every College Dorm Needs” on the popular technology website, Hacker News. He was so used to his submissions failing that he completely forgot about the posting. Then he started to see users trickle in. First 20, then another 20, a few hours later he had a few hundred. By the end of the day he had over 1,000 users and was one of the top 125 apps on the free apps section in the iTunes App store. He followed that submission by writing this blog post about the experience.
Ryan’s app is called Popcorn Messaging, and it’s becoming very popular.
Popcorn’s concept is very basic, a chat room in a 1 mile radius from where you are. When Ryan started coding Popcorn, he had one thing in my mind: simplicity. The app is beautifully designed and very clean (you know exactly what to do when you get in). Ryan built the first version of the app in about 11 hours.
There are some interesting use cases for Popcorn: college campuses, sports events (and even scalping), music concerts, and more. While Hacker News helped with the first 1,000 users, coverage in a few more outlets (specifically blog posts in Japan and Netherlands) has helped Popcorn become a viable full-time project.
I had a chance to connect with Ryan this week to hear his story and see about his future plans.
Alex Taub: Who's on the Popcorn team and how did you guys meet?
Ryan Friedman: Timmy Irani and I founded Popcorn. We met in kindergarten and have been friends ever since. During our early teens we both obsessed over computer games. In college we started building websites and then transitioned into iPhone apps. Timmy does all of our design work and I do the coding.
Taub: How did you come up with the name?
Friedman: Back in middle school, teachers used to make us read books out loud. After your turn you would say "popcorn” and name another student, who would have to continue reading from where you left off. The rest of the class never knew who was going to read next, and the surprise reminded us of a group chat room where, similarly, no one knows who will be the next to talk.
Taub: How did you come up with idea for the app?
Friedman: One of my favorite bands, Avenged Sevenfold, was giving away free tickets to an album release concert at the Hollywood Palladium. The only catch was that you had to come a few days before the show and wait in line. I was shocked when I got there to see a couple hundred people already waiting. I immediately worried that they would run out of tickets and I would melt in the heat.
While I was waiting in line, I started chatting with the guy in front of me and the couple behind me. Of course it was all about the new album, Hail to the King, but after the conversation died down I realized most other people were killing time on their phones. Based on our location alone, I obviously had something in common with everyone there. We all love Avenged, we're all dying in the heat, and we’re all kind of bored turning to our phones. I thought it would be cool if I could just chat with the people here and geek out over music.
I wondered if there were existing ways to do this. Hashtags on Twitter opened the conversation to anyone, which would be too inclusive.
I let the idea simmer over the weekend. Three days later, I was back at the Hollywood Palladium for the concert itself. I ran into a lot of the same people that were waiting in line. It was awesome. I was there with 5 of my best friends. But one catch - we needed an extra ticket. A friend was visiting from Israel so that meant I needed to scalp. I started walking through the crowd asking if anyone had an extra to sell, and again found myself thinking about the chat app. If I were to post something like, "Hey need an extra ticket, meet out in front of the venue", I knew I would have no trouble finding one. I knew if I was going to use the app this way, that it would have maintain personal privacy which is what influenced us to only require a username and password on sign up.
Taub: How did you learn iOS development? Do you have any advice for up and coming programmers?
Friedman: Besides the 'Intro to Programming' class I took in college, everything I learned came from books and online tutorials. To the up-and-comers, the best advice I can offer is to choose a personal project and start building it rather than spending all day following tutorials. The more you create something unique and novel to yourself, the harder you'll work to actually build it and the harder you'll push through when you get to a wall.
Taub: Where do you want to go with Popcorn?
Friedman: Moving forward, I want to take the app into every densely populated city throughout the world. Events, sports games, and universities are all obvious targets. Essentially anywhere large groups of people would gather.
On the techie side, I think Popcorn could be the first app to create an effective serval mesh. If you’ve ever been to a concert or sports game with thousands of people, you've probably noticed how bad the cellular service gets. A serval mesh utilizes bluetooth in several phones to create a local network, allowing them to communicate without cell towers. Instead of losing your friends at a huge festival and not being able to get a hold of them because of the bad cell service, you’d actually be able to reach them.
Taub: Side project or full time?
Friedman: When we launched Popcorn two weeks ago it was definitely a side project. We didn't know what to expect since we had built three apps prior (Soundtribe, Sightstream, and SmashBucket Basketball) with minimal success. However, it’s been immediately clear that Popcorn is different. The app took off much faster than we were prepared for, thanks to Japan's #1 tech blog Gigazine, as well as another blog from the Netherlands, writing thorough reviews on the app. The app has continued to enjoy steady growth since, and today we launched a webpage to show which areas have been unlocked worldwide (you can see most major College campuses are unlocked) .
Taub: How did you feel when your blog post hit the front page of Hacker News?
Friedman: I was surprised that the post about the app itself made it to the front page. Hacker News is very tech-focused, so social networking apps typically don't get as much circulation. On the other hand, I was not surprised that the "1000 users in 1 day" post made it there. That was highly expected.
Taub: What are the various uses for Popcorn?
Friedman: Meeting new people in your college dorm, talking with fellow metal heads at a concert, debating Rails vs Django at a tech conference. The possibilities are manifold.
Taub: Where do you think it will do very well?
Friedman: Dorms at universities. Back when I lived in the dorms at UCSB we had a private IRC channel that only the nerds used. It was a cool way for us all to communicate and share experiences of living in the same spot, going to the same school, and eating the same awful cafeteria food.
Dorms are great because everyone's looking to meet new people. Posting to Facebook groups might disclose too much info. Since Popcorn only requires a username you can rid yourself of the hesitation you feel in exposing that you might be lonely. Popcorn was built with user-privacy in mind, so you only have to give up the info you actually want to.
Taub: What features are you going to add? What have been people asking for?
Friedman: We’ve had a lot of interest from Android users so we started developing an app for them last week. In terms of features, we just added a new one that shows your current location on a map with a 1-mile circular overlay around it. Lots of people, myself included, have a hard time visualizing what a 1-mile radius actually looks like. Also, our international users are all translating 1 mile into 1.6km, so the visual representation is even more important. This should give people a visual context about the people they are chatting with. The number 1 feature requested so far has been push notifications, which will be added in the next update.
Taub: Where can people follow the app for future updates?
Friedman: Twitter at http://twitter.com/popcorn_chat
Facebook at http://facebook.com/popcornmessaging
Instagram @popcornapp
You can also download the app in the iOS app store here: https://appsto.re/us/bTI0Q.i
