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Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

#11

Post by genystartup »

tomjen3 wrote: post #10

Hmm when I look at I don't see any difference between this an frid.ge, etc and there seems to be no way to look closer at it without signing up to yet another service. So how does this differ from the rest of the group chat systems?

I had come up with this because I had some friends who were on Facebook but nothing else, there were some without Facebook or Twitter and only used Gmail. My idea was a way of setting up a 'group chat platform' where users can come in from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail and still be able to interact with each other in one place.

Re: Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

#12

Post by lefstathiou »

Agree whole-heartedly. I am still trying to figure out what exactly it takes to be what I refer to as a "sweet heart of silicon valley". Some companies repeatedly get covered regardless of how minor and marginal their new feature is (I recall reading about chat roulette's new wall paper a couple weeks ago).

Same situation in the group messaging space. I am the cofounder of Groupie, which is tied with Beluga as the highest rated group messaging app on the App Store. We have tens of thousands of users and tens of thousands of groups. In fact, you cant search for GroupMe without seeing Groupie, yet we've never been covered. It's a mystery to me but that ultimately hasn't stopped us from growing and with a good product, it won't stop you from growing either.

On that note, happy to make myself available you should want to discuss anything since we've probably hit a few hurdles that you're undoubtedly going to confront.

Good luck.

Leo at groupie dot co

Re: Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

#13

Post by genystartup »

lefstathiou wrote: post #12

Agree whole-heartedly. I am still trying to figure out what exactly it takes to be what I refer to as a "sweet heart of silicon valley". Some companies repeatedly get covered regardless of how minor and marginal their new feature is (I recall reading about chat roulette's new wall paper a couple weeks ago). Same situation in the group messaging space. I am the cofounder of Groupie, which is tied with Beluga as the hi…

Thanks for the intro mate! Will certainly shoot you an e-mail soon. And I agree with your comments. I haven't said any of these to mock the writers (infact I won't mention the publications), because it's completely up to them to decide who they write about and who they won't write about. I just want to encourage anyone else who was/is in the same boat that being covered helps a lot - yes, but that's all it does. It doesn't disqualify you at all. If I had only been covered on a big blog on Friday, don't think I would have even got to 2k users by now.

Re: Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

#14

Post by jgervin »

lefstathiou wrote: post #12

Agree whole-heartedly. I am still trying to figure out what exactly it takes to be what I refer to as a "sweet heart of silicon valley". Some companies repeatedly get covered regardless of how minor and marginal their new feature is (I recall reading about chat roulette's new wall paper a couple weeks ago). Same situation in the group messaging space. I am the cofounder of Groupie, which is tied with Beluga as the hi…

Not sure if it still holds true today, but in the past with some blog tech writers, you needed to submit your pitch something like this.

Hello, .

Thanks,

P.S. attached is an Apple Macbook Pro, cheers.

Re: Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

#15

Post by piranha »

Why does it ask for permission to post tweets when I try to authorize through Twitter? Can you consider switching to read-only access? I hate that every application, which uses twitter only for authorization, seems to want to post a lot of stuff in my twitter account, which I certainly do not want. :(

Re: Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

#17

Post by genystartup »

piranha wrote: post #15

Why does it ask for permission to post tweets when I try to authorize through Twitter? Can you consider switching to read-only access? I hate that every application, which uses twitter only for authorization, seems to want to post a lot of stuff in my twitter account, which I certainly do not want. :(

hey mate, that page only asks you if you want to post to your twitter or not. If the user doesn't want to, he can hit proceed and move on to the next page. I haven't made it compulsory to do that. To be honest...that page is one of the reasons for the significant increase in signups.

Re: Group Messaging apps – so simple, you don’t need $12Million to do it.

#18

Post by mnutt »

jgervin wrote: post #14
lefstathiou wrote: post #12

Agree whole-heartedly. I am still trying to figure out what exactly it takes to be what I refer to as a "sweet heart of silicon valley". Some companies repeatedly get covered regardless of how minor and marginal their new feature is (I recall reading about chat roulette's new wall paper a couple weeks ago). Same situation in the group messaging space. I am the cofounder of Groupie, which is tied with Beluga as the hi…

Not sure if it still holds true today, but in the past with some blog tech writers, you needed to submit your pitch something like this. Hello, . Thanks, P.S. attached is an Apple Macbook Pro, cheers.

In this case I think it's a bit simpler. GroupMe was born at TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day 2010, and is probably the biggest success story of that event by an order of magnitude. Hence, they got a lot of TC coverage early on.
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