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Imoji, A Personalized And Creative Emoji, Launches Today

This article is more than 9 years old.

Bored with the generic and repetitive nature of emojis, six friends in San Francisco wanted a way to make text messaging more personal and fun. They saw an opportunity in the growth around traditional stickers, but believed they could do more to expand this concept and appeal to a wider audience. The friends - ex- Apple , Instagram, Ribbon, JPMorgan, etc. - Dan Brusilovsky, Kirk Lacob, Jason Stein, Ben Draa, Nima Khoshini, and Tom Smith - are releasing Imoji, today, a more personalized and creative emoji.

As a team they constructed the goldilocks solution, where users can turn their own photos into custom stickers.  Additionally, they saw an opportunity to build a platform that enables users to share their Imoji and contribute to an unlimited collection of user-generated stickers spanning all interests. These two elements represent the ideal offering; personalization with unlimited creative potential.

I had a chance to connect with Tom Smith from the Imoji team to find out how they came together and what they are looking to accomplish with their product.

Alex Taub: How did you all come together to start Imoji?

Tom Smith: The team is a group of friends who met largely in San Francisco. Ben Draa and Jason Stein are childhood friends and Kirk Lacob and myself have been roommates for years. Dan has been a close friend with each of us for a long time.

Taub: What do each of you do for Imoji?

Smith: Jason and Ben run the legal and financial side of the organization. Kirk and Dan operate largely in an advisory and business development capacity working to ensure we are well positioned in the market. I manage the product which consists of, engineering, design, identity, and future product development.

Taub: What are you hoping to accomplish with Imoji?

Smith: We have a number of ideas for future features and other enhancements to the product but to keep things simple, we hope Imoji brings some personalization and creativity to users text conversations.

Taub: In the limited time people have been playing with imoji what have you seen?

Smith: The most staggering observation has been usage. We send a pre release version to 100  designers and influencers. In a very short period we saw some pretty staggering traffic on the system. Both from "sends" and the number of imojis created.

The other notable observation which was shocking is the level of creativity. Imojis have started to take on all shapes and sizes. It goes to show that giving people the tools to express themselves leads to some amazing creation.

Taub: Where do you think the emoji craze is going?

Smith: Emojis are great at communicating an emotion or tone in a text message so they will continue to play a part in the way people communicate. Where we think things are heading is a more flexible and creative form of communication, one which adds a new dimension to a text message. We've designed Imoji to be just that.