SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
From 0 to 1 Billion Impressions With Imoji Founders Daniel and Jason EP 204:
14 Mar 2016
Chapter 1: How did Daniel and Jason meet and start i-Moji?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks that I give away every Monday is Kim Dust. She's in the entertainment industry and is currently working a full-time day job and doing her side hustle on the side. Kim, congrats.
For you guys' chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to officially enter. Again, text the word NATHAN to 33444 after you've subscribed. Coming up tomorrow morning, Top Tribe, and every morning at 9 a.m., you'll hear from Daniel Grusolowski. He went from zero to one billion impressions with his emoji company.
Okay, Top Tribe, good morning.
Chapter 2: What challenges did i-Moji face in its early days?
Nathan Latke here. I'm here with my coffee and we've got two folks on this morning. You guys are all going to really enjoy. The first is Daniel Brusilofsky and his partner, Jason Stein. Again, his partner at iMoji. They're the co-founders and it is the largest sticker library in the world. I think you're really going to enjoy them. Guys, are you ready to take us to the top? Oh, yeah. Nice.
Daniel's like, oh, crap, do we both respond or just one of us? Okay, so guys, first off, first things first, how did you guys meet? How did you guys get connected?
Yeah, we actually, it's kind of a funny story. We met through a bunch of mutual friends who actually ended up being our other co-founders.
Chapter 3: How does i-Moji generate revenue despite being a B2C product?
So there's actually six founders of Emoji. And so we all met a few years ago and just became really good friends. And as we were kind of talking about, stickers and how the whole emoji space was blowing up, these were kind of the perfect people to start this company with. And so fast forward a few years and kind of here we are.
So Daniel, you're a pretty young guy, right? You're like 21, 22 or something? 23 now. 23. And Jason, are you a young guy too?
Yeah.
A little older than Daniel. I just turned 28. Okay, very cool. So what I mean, people listening right now are going to go, oh my gosh, Nathan is having these Silicon Valley people on.
Chapter 4: What strategies does i-Moji use to curate trending content?
They're building a freaking emoji business. Why aren't they like solving world hunger? How do you guys make decisions about what problems you throw your very talented minds at?
I think the big thing for us is do what you're passionate about. If you see something that's a problem, whether it's in your daily life or it's at the world level, whatever it is, if you can follow your passion, that's how you'll find a way to be successful. For us, we actually did see a problem in messaging where text messaging is very dry. You can be really misunderstood in a simple text.
And as it was becoming a huge part of daily life where you're constantly texting people, we didn't want to be confined to a really limited and static set of regular emojis. So this was actually born out of a kind of problem we were seeing. And for us, it's about following your path more than anything.
And Jason, tell me a bit about your background. Is this your first kind of jump into the startup world or have you had some other companies?
Um, yeah, I was so before this, I worked at hotel tonight actually, where it was a really early on. I joined when they were about 30 people, um, and watch the company grow to about 150 before starting my own thing. But it was an awesome experience being there.
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Chapter 5: What advice do the founders have for raising capital in the B2C space?
It's a really, really great company. And I loved every day going into work there.
And so what is the walk us through how you guys are making money at emoji? How's it work?
So right now, we're purely focused on growing our audience and growing our distribution. The one thing we've done really in the past is work quickly to get products out and experiment. So when we first launched the product about, what is it, Daniel, maybe a year and a half ago or two years ago, We were really a creation tool.
And what happened is we launched and we were so fortunate to get a ton of early adopters and a lot of great press and a lot of people creating custom stickers. So we knew that we struck a nerve there. What we did from there is we tested different products out to figure out what was the best medium of getting people to use emoji and how do we get the idea to be really big.
And so after we iterated on a few different ideas and concepts, the one that we saw the most traction in and really decided to follow was this SDK and API approach. And the idea there is we have millions of stickers. We have really powerful keyword search because they're all tagged.
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Chapter 6: How does i-Moji plan to achieve billions of impressions monthly?
And we have really great curated trending and reaction categories by our content team. And the way we can make this work the best is to give users a fast and relevant experience. And the best way to do that is to embed it in apps with native integrations.
So we work on partnering with various apps, whether they have no users in our prelaunch or 100 million plus downloads, and they want to give their users a really cool sticker experience.
Definitely. Can we talk about like a real story? Like maybe, I don't know if it was the, maybe the Iowa caucuses, you guys had some real time stuff going on, but can you tell us an actual story of how Imoji was used in one of these recent events?
Uh, I'm not sure if that was us. You may be, it may be something else.
I don't know if it was you that's, but you just said real time and reaction based stickers. So I'm just thinking about events that happened at a national or worldwide level recently. And I want, it'd be helpful for the audience to understand a real life example of you guys in action.
Sure. So we're first and foremost, we're a consumer facing product. The latest strategy is B2B to C play.
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Chapter 7: What role does user experience play in i-Moji's success?
But since it's coming up on the Super Bowl, I'll give you an example. Last year during the Super Bowl, when the left shark went rogue and started dancing around the stage and became basically an Internet sensation overnight.
If you searched Left Shark in the emoji database after that halftime show, there was content already coming in and organically being generated, which means people were seeing it on TV, getting an image, creating their sticker, publishing it and tagging it. There's no other platform in the world that does stickers that can get as trending and relevant content out to users as fast as that.
Where would I see this? I start a new SMS message on my phone after Left Shark goes rogue and I see it just pop up. How do you know to show me that I should use a Left Shark sticker?
Yeah. So what we saw is when that happened, we looked at kind of search volume over the course of, and we look at this all the time or what are popular terms, what are trending terms. With that, we saw a lot of just organic searches in our database for left shark.
The same thing happens with other events where we tracked where, you know, last year when unfortunately Robin Williams passed away, we saw more searches for Robin Williams. And so when things happen like that, What we do is we go and we look through our database and we try to curate content to make it a trending category.
If people are searching for it organically or there is more action going towards a certain word, our content team will curate a category and put it in our trending list where people can then click into it and find it easier. So they necessarily don't have to keyword search for it.
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Chapter 8: What insights do Daniel and Jason share about entrepreneurship?
We just place it in front of them. Sorry. Go ahead, Daniel.
I'll just give you another example.
Can we focus on like the consume listening right now? These are all potential users of emoji. Is this something they're going to see in their SMS app? Is there going to see it embedded in Facebook messenger to use Robin Williams? Like where do they actually experience this?
Yeah, I mean, we have, I think it's almost 50 partners who have integrated the SDK or the API. So whether you're using a keyboard like Flexi or Edge or Emote or Slash or you're using text-free or even Dubsmash, you'll be able to find emojis through all those apps. We also have our own keyboard.
So if you want to use iMessage and emojis with that, you can either do it through the Emoji app or through our native... keyboard. So it's, it's, there's many, many ways where you can actually find emojis.
But what I wanted to kind of bring up another example of, of where you can, you know, a recent event, you know, DJ Khaled, he's just been blowing up and, and it's really happened in the last month or two when his Snapchat fame has just absolutely taken off. And so again, what Jason was saying is our content team then goes and finds the best DJ Khaled
And then we feature them in both the emoji app and then in our partner apps. So whatever's happening in the world, whether it's the Super Bowl or whether it's a new movie that's coming out or whatever it may be, our content team is looking at all those different things and then figuring out what's the best content to show to our users.
All those different partner applications, whether it's, you know, whether it's text-free or whether it's in the emoji keyboard or Dubsmash.
So if I have Facebook Messenger opened, do I have to have the emoji app downloaded for me to see these emojis inside of Facebook Messenger? Or will Facebook Messenger show me those even without the emoji native app downloaded?
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