Why we killed imwith and launched GIFted (Guggy YC S17)

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Why we killed imwith and launched GIFted (Guggy YC S17)

Hey everyone, 6 months ago we launched imwith - a NLP-based GIF messenger. I’d like to share with you why we decided to discontinue imwith and launch GIFted. imwith enabled you to chat and get automatic suggestions for relevant GIFs based on what you type. The experience for adding GIFs to your conversation was sleek, seamless and much much better than other messengers. The UI was unique as well. For example, there wasn’t any ‘send’ button. You’d send the message by swiping it. It was extremely novel, but it didn’t really take off (retention wise). We tried a lot of things and nothing really worked. We had endless debates of whether we should optimize the product or start from scratch, it was pretty frustrating. At some point we decided to follow a hunch we had for a while, and enabled users to direct and act GIFs for pre-defined tags (#smile, #grouphug etc.). We were excited about the idea that our NLP engine will offer users their own GIFs. The results were great! Users recorded 50, 60 and even 90 GIFs in their first session and under 15 minutes, they loved that part. But unfortunately they didn’t use the GIFs in the messenger. They actually didn’t use the messenger at all. We decided to discontinue our messenger and to launch GIFted, a GIF community in which people GIF themselves to express their take on specific situations, emotions and gestures. A month ago, we silently launched our early beta and so far thousands of teens across the US have created so many hilarious, creative GIFs…repeatedly, check the user @maxdd4l. He’s going to become famous one day :) GIFted users can browse GIFs, act their own GIFs and participate in a daily GIF challenge. Things look much better now (retention wise). What do you think about GIFted? I’d be happy to get any feedback and answer questions about our journey. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gifted-gif-yo-self/id1435132...