Good morning all!
Ebroji was born out of a few observations and desires related to tech, culture and language.
We're on our phones ALL the time. Smartphone users spend 114 minutes on average per day texting.
Text lacks tone and texture, nuance and spark and Gifs are magic: they inject such a contagious joy and spontaneity into any thread that the experience of nailing just the right one(s) becomes cathartic.
Language is also culture. It can be niche, words and phrases can take off as trends, be celebrated, mocked, spoiled and remixed. Urban and Black American culture is particularly sticky and ever-changing: culturally specific words and phrases transform from an American mainstream laughing stock to corporate currency in a matter of weeks, months even days. Aryn, Glenn and I found the climate erratic, fascinating and frustrating.
Why wait for mainstream validation, and it's inevitable exploitation of language before getting creative with it's use? Why text in black in white when we have color? Why wrestle tone and the patchwork of modern communication threads with the same old winking emoji that everyone uses, everywhere? Why crawl when we can run?
Ebroji takes and inspires that engagement by kicking open the boundaries of visual communication all together! No more foraging the inter-wilderness for gifs like a lonesome hoarder. Kick back, relax and keep cracking jokes with your homies because Ebroji meets you exactly where you live, in your damn keyboard! From the latest digi-cultural sensations to the deepest (and most random) gifs, Ebroji sorts and supplies them at your fingertips.
As your gif concierge, we do all the work and leave you with the good stuff: the fun and the credit.
@asalamunovic as the founder of Popkey, a product in a similar space, it would be very cool for you to offer your advice and learnings. Some great examples of this type of feedback from inspirational founders can be found here from Ben of Meerkat & Dom from Peach, here
As a supportive community of awesome people building, discovering and using cool new products like Popkey and Ebroji, that type of advice from founders is what we love to see and all value from. It makes us a little sad when we see comments that don't help each other out, especially when we can.
Thanks Ben. Yes, we honestly didn't anticipate launching publicly this soon, and are building the tutorial vids and supplemental app store images now. We'd been sharing early Ebroji versions with a diverse test population but the nature of Ebroji is using it and "using it" is communicating with your people which really just becomes this contagious pillow fight of creative, enhanced expression and before we knew it our test group's size exploded: recipients of amazing gifs that perfectly express the moment, coming at you faster than writing a sentence is a helluva recruiting tool. "How the hell did you have that random Karate Kid training Gif at the ready when I texted you about training today?" "Ebroji son."
Once we discovered Product Hunt, we were inspired to just dive in and improve as we go.
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