Application No. 1 YOLO Q & A is the first success of the platform Snapchat – TechCrunch

There is a new sensation of application for teenagers. The anonymous application of questions-questions, YOLO, has come to the forefront of US applications barely a week after its launch thanks to Snapchat. Built on the Snap Kit platform, YOLO uses Snapchat for connection and Bitmoji profile photos to allow you to add a "Ask me nothing" sticker to your Snapchat story. Friends can swipe to open YOLO on iOS and send an anonymous question to which you can then reply via another sticker posted on your story. One source said, "EVERYONE in my high school is using it right now." And the crazy thing is that the inventor of YOLO told me that it was all an accident.

If you've ever seen, you may be thinking about Sarahah. This application exploded in late 2017 by allowing you to attach a link from your Snapchat Story account to your Sarahah profile, where people could ask you anonymous questions … until it was launched on iOS and Android in early 2018 for facilitating intimidation. Or maybe you think about how the Polly survey app let Snapchat's friends ask you anything before there's a Snap Kit.

The question now is whether YOLO's warning when registering that it has "no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users" or if its tagging and tagging features blocking in the app protect it from teenager abuse or anger from Apple and Google.

The rise of YOLO shows how curious teenagers are and can be desperate to receive honest comments or anonymous gossip. Given the invitation via Snapchat to say something to friends without having to take responsibility, children flock to download YOLO. Since they do not have to create a new profile or image through Snap Kit to import their account and Bitmoji, and that they can use the ubiquity of Snapchat among teens to spread their questions and their answers, YOLO is extremely easy to reach. This pushed the No. 1 application in the United States according to App Annie.

But as with Sarahah, Secret, YikYak and other anonymous applications prior to this one, YOLO is likely to be used to spread hate speech and intimidation. Since school-age children can get in trouble for insulting someone in the hallway, they are able to torment their peers via apps, especially if they add to those that everyone else already using.

The developer of Yolo, a startup called Popshow, is desperately trying to prevent the application's servers from merging and adding new features for teenagers to stay. There was no publicly available information about who started Popshow, even in the deposits of his brand and his constitution. But after some research, a source revealed that Popshow and YOLO had been created by Gregoire Henrion, former co-founder and CEO of the Mindie Music Video Creation app.

"It was not supposed to be a success. It was just for us to learn, "Henrion told me in his first interview about his startup. "Let's just put it on the App Store and see how people behave. He went 100% viral. It's crazy. Even we did not believe our eyes when we saw this [it went to #1]. "

Henrion's previous start-up, Mindie you had shared audio clips with your Snapchat story. He raised $ 1.2 million from tiny, SV Angel, Dave Morin, Troy Carter and more. But in 2015, Snapchat was blocked for security reasons because users had to provide their user name and their password snap. YOLO is really taking advantage of Snapchat's Snap Kit platform, designed specifically to eliminate the need for Mindie's basic integrations. Mindie missed his chance to become Musical.ly, which was later bought and merged into the global TikTok phenomenon. Mindie was finally taken over by Shots in 2016, within the content production and selfie production collective supported by Justin Bieber.

In 2017, Clement Raffenoux, co-founder of Henrion and Mindie, was back in the creation of a new startup. SV Angel, Shrug Captial, Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover, as well as some angel investors, participated in a first series of preliminary meetings and experimented with the Popshow video app. Then they decided to explore the anonymous application space. But instead of being completely anonymous and public, YOLO allows users to privately examine questions, decide who they want to respond to and share with Snapchat, and include a selfie when they share, so that respondents know that there is a real person on the other side. . "We believe that anonymity can unlock very good behavior. We think that we are more empathetic, more humane than other anonymous applications before us, "explains Henrion.

The result was "1000X what we expected" beams Henrion. And he insists that growth is totally organic. "We tried shitty things just to try them, but it does not work," including responding from the Popshow account to thousands of people who tweeted "I miss Vine". "I do not believe in false growth anymore. We just put it in the store, people typed YOLO in the search, and the loop was so effective that the product made its way. "

The challenge will be to maintain YOLO's momentum. Another anonymous Q & A application, TBH, reached # 1 in September 2017, was purchased by Facebook three weeks later, but fell among the top 500 apps by the end of November before Be closed last year. Teenagers are extremely capricious. If they feel that YOLO is "finished", they are bored because of the lack of new features, if they are overwhelmed by harassment or if a new fad comes out, they might drop rankings. Henrion said his team was striving to turn YOLO into something more expansive without losing simplicity, while developing automated tools to eliminate bullying.

There is also the threat that Snapchat simply installs a similar feature of anonymous questions and answers in its own application. But it is the risk of creating above any platform that would massively reduce the development and marketing costs of an application. This will become a powerful case study that will surely attract tons of developers to the Snapchat platform. With so many features of YOLO optimized by Snap Kit and it is simply an experiment, Henrion will not lose much if his application dies and he goes to the next idea.