This is the beginning of the story of metoo — it is the first of many posts detailing my experience of trying to make an idea successful.
I started college studying Computer Science at the University of Rhode Island in the fall of 2015. Living on campus, I made my fair share of friends — but as much as I would’ve loved an opportunity to grab lunch and catch up with any of them, it never just happened, for a couple reasons:
- Humans are really bad at remembering things without some sort of trigger (this is something I’ll touch on more in the future). As a result, when making plans to get food, it doesn’t just occur to me or my friend to text specifically the other person out of the blue asking if they’re around for lunch.
- Besides it being difficult to recall individual friends to invite (meaning, outside the people that are part of your routine), even if you have someone in mind, you don’t know what their schedule is like. If you’re anything like me, the doubt that they’re even free is usually enough to stop you from reaching out at all. In other words, the perceived effort to reach out was not worth the perceived reward, so there was not enough incentive (humans are really bad at estimating this too. I’ll get into this in a future blog post).
- If I did reach out, more times than not I’d get a “sorry I was in class, you still there?” an hour after I’ve left.
Does that seem familiar? Can you Relate™?
(I’d really hope so, otherwise I’ve wasted my time making this app)
By the end of freshman year, I’d become fed up with texting the same five people to go to the dining hall, only to not get a response and go with my roommate for the ∞ᵗʰ time. I was faced with a choice — come to terms with the fact that maybe my friends just don’t want to hang out with me, or develop an app for making plans. I took the easier route.
Freshman Year: Spring ‘16
The earliest evidence I found of my idea was a screenshot of a note on March 12th, 2016:
I started doing some research on how to make an app, but despite having a pretty solid background in comp sci, I was in way over my head. I shared my idea with only a few trusted friends, worried that someone might take it. I came to find out ideas are a dime a dozen, odds are you’re not the first person to come up with something.
After a couple of weeks trying to get into iOS development, I stumbled across an app called DownToLunch. It was blowing up — it hit #1 in the App Store for a couple of days, and was all over social media. So, having very little direction to develop my own app, I assume DTL to be the answer to my prayers of an easier way to make plans and concede (temporary) defeat.
The only tangible progress I made was a project folder called munchr, with one file called “test” that was two lines long:
//This is the beginning, I guess
var launch = "it's lit"Which I find pretty amusing — in terms of effort I’d give it a D+ but also “a pleasure to have in class.”
Sophomore Year: Fall ’16-Spring ’17
Fall semester sophomore year, I rushed & joined a fraternity, and focused more on my social life and classes than the idea of the app. By spring semester, I had finally become comfortable with all my new friends and new social habits.
I’d begun to notice a recurring theme of high effort/low reward in trying to make plans with people. I would hit up my fraternity group chat at least once a day to see who was around to go to the dining hall. Again, I’d become fed up with rarely getting a response and I’m sure the 70+ guys in the group chat were equally fed up with my incessant messages.
As the semester drew to a close, I looked into DTL again, wondering why it had never materialized on my campus. Neither the app nor their social media had been updated in months, so I assumed it to be dead. It was relatively mind boggling that there was no mainstream app people my age used for making plans— it’s not all that original a concept. I mean sure, there’s Find My Friends, and I guess you could tweet about what you’re doing?? Snapchat’s map wasn’t a thing yet (though it soon would be), and let’s be honest, when’s the last time you used Facebook events for anything? 2013?
Summer ‘17
I began obsessing over the idea again. I took Calc II (June-July) because it’d be easier than dragging it out over a semester with other classes, but instead of really paying attention I’d just sit and brainstorm ideas for the app, at the time named “loca”. Snapchat’s launched their map feature right before class one day, and I spent the entire class shook that my app was going to be useless as a result. I got over it after a couple days and instead now view it as a benefit, but that’s a topic for a future blog post. I’m an avid runner (when it’s warm outside), and I would frequently stop mid-run to note down a new idea I’d had.
August
I came up with the name “metoo” accidentally when describing the app to someone, and registered the domain name metoo.io the same day (August 7th, 2017, two months before the #MeToo movement started). I also began the process of incorporating and trademarking around the same time — I’ll get into more detail regarding that at the end.
I made a barebones landing page with a mailing list to stay up to date. If you signed up, you got an email that looked like this, most notably saying “We hope to launch before October.” Which, like…lmao. Remember when I said humans are really bad at estimating? That’s gonna keep coming up.
I asked a vaguely worded question on Quora looking for some direction in developing an app. I got a few answers, but one by someone we’ll call “Al” (for the sake of privacy) really stood out — it was well written, informative and pretty entertaining. He also followed up with a private message asking for some more details about the app. Al was 25, from India, had experience with both frontend and backend development, and from what I could tell, a pretty genuine dude. We messaged back and forth a few times, and scheduled a Skype call. I was pretty paranoid about getting Zuckerberged, but he didn’t raise any red flags.
Over the next couple weeks, we would Skype most nights as he helped me set up my developing environment, explained tools, and worked to figure out what exactly we would use to develop different parts of the app. He pointed me to React Native (aka RN), a javascript framework used for developing mobile apps. He also pointed me to Expo, a React Native SDK that basically makes it much easier to develop RN apps.
Finally having a sense of direction, I began teaching myself RN by watching youtube tutorials that implemented similar projects: I’d take pieces of whatever the tutorial was making and try to apply it to my app. Anytime I would get stuck, Al would clear things up for me and get me pointed in the right direction again.
Fall ‘17
Immediately after the first comp sci class of the semester, I approached a few of my closest friends and told them about my idea and where I was in terms of progress. They were all pretty interested, and so the team grew again. At this point, the team was 7 strong — me, Al, and 5 of my friends. Al would go on to spend several hours per person going through the same process of setting up their development environment and explaining tools.
As the semester moved along, I became more proficient with developing and started making actual progress — I was averaging 30 hours a week of code on top of taking 18 credits. Mid November, I noticed Al hadn’t been online in our team’s Slack chat, and hadn’t answered one of my messages to him for a couple weeks. I sent him an email asking where he’d been, and after a week, followed up on every other medium I could — Skype, Facebook, iMessage, etc. to no avail. Finally, in December, I sent him an email explaining I was going to remove his access to the code/slack/all other resources as a security precaution.
Two weeks after that, I was skyping one of my team members and I noticed Al had just come online, so I called him. It rang for a couple seconds and then said “the user is unavailable” so I can only assume he declined it.
I don’t know if I’ll ever find out why he ghosted us — he was only ever genuinely good natured, communicative, and helpful. I still can’t quite make sense of it, mostly because he asserted at many different points that his interest in this project was primarily as a learning experience. Right as all his effort teaching us was beginning to pay off and he could finally begin learning something new, he disappeared.
I highly doubt metoo would exist without the help of Al, for a number of reasons:
- App development (and coding in general) has a very steep learning curve, and without a mentor, it would’ve taken me significantly longer to begin making tangible progress and get any sort of momentum.
- Al pointed me to React Native and Expo — both of which made many things significantly easier for me: primarily, I could write 99% the same code for iOS and Android. As the lead developer, writing the same app in two different languages, neither of which I had much experience with (Swift/Objective C for iOS, Java for Android) was (and still is) simply out of the question.
- Having someone who was in the industry for a couple years believe in me/the idea enough to spend hours and hours helping me get started was immensely validating at a stage where self-confidence was essential to keep working despite the countless obstacles in my way.
So Al, if you ever read this, thank you.
I finished that semester somehow passing all my classes, which was entirely thanks to the help of my teammates who paid attention while I just worked on metoo stuff.
Spring ‘18
I was able to convince friends and family to invest a small amount of money in the app — though the idea had always been real to me, now shit was getting real to everyone. I also convinced my parents to let me only take one class to have more time for the app. The team shrunk to the 4 people you see on the website: Alden, Luke, Corey and I, because they were the only ones that had put in any sort of tangible work (they also happened to be my closer friends of the group). Removing the friends who were just kinda tagging along from the team was pretty hard, but that’s another lesson for a future blog post.
We launched the beta on Valentine’s Day, much to the excitement of my friends and twitter followers — once they could register, that is (registration didn’t work 100% of the time for another 2 days). We hit 100 users that day.
That night, after seeing all these people sign up and use something my friends and I made, I decided I loved the process of creating far too much to focus on school.
Having all but officially resigned my efforts to pursue my degree, I continued averaging 6.5 hours every day of code alone from January until we launched in April. By launch, Luke, Alden and I put over 2000 hours into the app. To further clarify, that is just time spent actively developing and doesn’t include all the research, phone calls with lawyers, photoshop, or long debates about functionality while playing ping pong with my teammates.
To a degree, the level of effort we put in was unhealthy/unsustainable. I ended up failing my only class, and one of my other teammates failed two. Sometimes that may be what it takes, but finding the balance is another thing I am continuing to learn, and will take me many future blog posts to explain.
We made some memes along the way, here are two of my favorites:
Launch
We launched around 5pm on Sunday, April 15th. We went from just under 200 registered users to over 1200 in 7 hours. That’s almost 3 signups per minute. Even though we haven’t gone viral yet, that still remains one of the best days of my life. The feeling is hard to describe. I spent months making constant sacrifices and giving my absolute all. I wrought an idea into existence by sheer force of will, and on its first official day, over a thousand people signed up.
In the remaining 3 weeks of the semester, we saw some very encouraging usage and growth despite how often the app crashed. We ended the semester at just over 2k downloads, and topped out at over 100 daily active users (aka DAUs).
So, where are we now?
Well, that was almost a year ago. The team at metooHQ has learned a good amount of shit. I’ve learned more from this than I can ever possibly hope to explain, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try — I feel like some of the things I’ve learned can be valuable to people, so expect more blogs. The best way to keep up with them is by joining my mailing list or following me on twitter. There will be a pt. 2 coming soon.
If you made it this far and haven’t downloaded it yet, what are you waiting for? metoo.io/download.
#MeToo
You may have noticed we have the same name as the #MeToo movement. I named this app metoo on August 7th (2 months before the movement began) and immediately purchased the domain metoo.io. I also spent a non-trivial (to a college student, at least) amount of money and effort to incorporate a business (metoo inc) and also filed for a trademark before the movement really began getting national attention.
That said, I was seriously considering rebranding — the #MeToo movement is incredibly important and long overdue, and if I launched an app that shared the name, it would divert attention from the movement which is I believe is morally wrong.
However, in light of the #TimesUp movement (which began January of 2018), I no longer felt that launching my app and calling it metoo would do damage to or detract attention from the counter sexual harassment movement. If anyone comes up with a better name, I’ll be more than happy take it — but it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed…
