rotemy

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...

Hi everyone, I'm Rotem from Guggy (https://guggy.com). We help you make your friends laugh by turning your text messages into personalized, funny GIFs. We're currently serving 4M GIFs daily.

It works like this: Whenever you want to spice up your conversation, you click on the Guggy button and get a selection of GIFs with your text in them. If you find one that you like and that you think is funny, you click it and a link gets copied to your clipboard.

When we started Guggy, we were trying to provide non-technical users with an easy way of creating funny GIFs, and for that we built a GIF editor, only to discover that the real problem was that people had a hard time combining the right text with the right GIF. That got us thinking that we should try to automatically create the text/image pairing, relieving users from the need to search and match. To do that, we've built an NLP engine that understands 'messaging language', that is, slang, excited writing (e.g. “soo amazinggg!”) and leetspeak, to name a few.

We’ve also built a fast image rendering engine that generates the final media for the user in real time. This stands out from existing solutions, which rely on existing media files (served via CDNs). We don’t store the files at all, we generate them on the fly at each request. That gives us flexibility in personalizing the content to the user.

We’re two co-founders who are also cousins. We have been working together on numerous projects for several years, and always wanted to build something related to humor. Of all the projects we've tried, this is the one that just sort of took off, and we've been following where the users want to take us. It's kind of a dream project because the technical challenges are interesting and we get to work in a space that amuses us.

Here is a real example from our users of how a regular message can become expressive and engaging using Guggy - https://img.guggy.com/media/iL1rqhoZE7/animated/2/h/guggy.gi...

We offer our own Android/iOS GIF keyboards for natural experience, or you can just use our standalone apps. We also have bots and an API so you can use Guggy via messengers such as Facebook and Slack.

I've heard that this place can be a bit serious! but if you don't find it annoying, we may reply to bits of your text in the comments with Guggy URLs, just for fun and to show what the system can do.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on our product, and feel free to head to guggy.com and reply with Guggy GIFs :)