Facebook Official

I was in high school when Facebook started becoming a thing in the Midwest. My older friends had a page and I honestly thought it was more of a Flickr functionality. I got one and used it to upload photos from my digital camera to post on my Myspace… I had no idea how to use it and wasn’t interested in its simple user interface. Imagine my bewilderment when my Mom found out I had a Facebook and she grounded me for six weeks because she thought I did it behind her back. She had been hearing stories of wild, crazy college kids posting drunken encounters on the world wide web and was trying to prevent me from doing the same even though I was the nerdiest of nerds obsessed with Disney movies and reading.

It wasn’t until I went to college Facebook meant something to me. Really my girlfriends and I used it to see who was in a relationship and who was single on our campus. The first task a newly established couple completed was to become “Facebook Official.” This was the ultimate show of commitment and guaranteed life long happiness (I learned later on that couldn’t be further from the truth #younglove). Logically, this meant any bachelor not Facebook official was single as a pringle and ready to mingle! I think many current Facebook users see the silliness of it all and refrain from announcing to all the world if we’re in a relationship or slowly becoming the neighborhood’s spinster cat lady (thank you Andrew for saving me from that title). The term sticks though. Recently my very close friend (my college roommate that ironically enough I scoured Facebook for a good hour to find her now husband’s page when she first met him at our local pub) gave birth to an adorable baby boy. When she first got pregnant, she told her close friends but waited to make it “Facebook Official.” Same thing goes for engagements and career announcements or anything else life changing.

Well, seeing its importance in our lives, Andrew and I made Anchor “Facebook Official” on Monday! We posted the below post and were shocked with the response.

Andrew and I created an app! Nine months ago, Andrew taught himself app development and has been working nonstop on Apple’s newest location-based social networking mobile application. Anchor was created to “anchor” visual, organic memories of people and places. Imagine if Zillow and Vine had a baby, it’d be Anchor. We’ve been moonlighting as co-founders of Anchor and would like your help! Andrew officially submitted Anchor for Beta testing and now we need testers to provide feedback and test all of Anchor’s features. If you have an iOS device (iPhone/iPad) and are interested in participating, PM either Andrew or myself and we’ll get you signed up. There are 2K slots available, thus if you know anyone that’d be interested, please send them our way! We love what we’ve created, but we would appreciate any and all feedback to continue making Anchor the best app for you. Want to know more? Below are links to Anchor’s social media sites as well as our blog about our journey as two millennials discovering the world of app development!

Literally two seconds later, I got messages from friends I hadn’t talked to in years to participate in beta! It was a flood of likes, comments, and shares. People were genuinely excited for what Andrew and I had created and wanted to be a part of our journey. We even heard quite a bit of “make it available in Android” feedback, however that will be a hot second before that happens. Throughout the week, 591 people have visited our Anchor Facebook page, 44 have liked it, and 237 people have watched my Anchor 101 tutorial! We couldn’t believe it! We knew we’d receive support from our immediate families and friends, but we never expected so many people to reach out! We have 36 official downloads of Anchor, with more coming in each day. It’s been an exciting week for sure! And a busy one. Both of us have been getting minimal sleep to provide top notch customer support. With everyone dropping Anchors, Andrew was able to find and fix a few bugs in our video playback. The East Coast is highly active all the way down to Florida, but we need more testers on the West Coast. We’re playing with the map view scroll feature to see how anchors should be represented across the United States. I noticed the anchors I dropped in Long Beach and San Francisco weren’t showing anymore from all the anchors being dropped here in DC and Pennsylvania. Andrew is playing with it, but we’ll definitely need more testers evenly spread across the country. We’re not too sure how to remedy that. We could start our Kickstarter earlier to get some coverage, but we’re hesitant to do that until we’re closer to final version.

I’m obsessed with this app. I frequently check the map view to see all the new anchors dropping. One of our best testers is a past coworker of mine. He gave us some excellent feedback and dropped anchors on his family vacation in the South and all the outings he’s been to this week. Being from St. Louis (#gocards), I always love this time of year. Preseason games and opening days litter my Facebook feed and I love every post. Which is why I was uber excited when our awesome tester posted this anchor at the Nats game in DC! Big events like baseball games and concerts are one of the original ideas behind Anchor. My mom randomly went to The Who concert a few weeks ago and she said she would have loved to see anchors from people all around the stadium. We do too. Andrew is beyond excited that Anchor has performed so well in high traffic areas at the Verizon Center and Nats Stadium. Thousands of people all in one area and Anchor had no problem operating. We even had someone drop an anchor from on top of a ferris wheel in National Harbor! I’m trying to convince Andrew for us to take a week of leave and explore the United States dropping anchors to showcase the amazing memories Anchor can capture and preserve. One day I’ll succeed.

During this morning’s Anchor staff meeting, Andrew and I discussed our marching orders for the week. My mom had given us some feedback awhile ago about having a place on the profile to view any notifications. I put it on the back burner because we were focused on bigger features, but as activity continues to grow, she definitely has a point. Being the stud he is, Andrew already updated his test version to show notifications from the home screen icon. He’s still working on the next step — to show notifications in a list format on the user profile. Our idea is to have a dropdown from the user’s username on the top bar of the profile page.

Andrew is also going to research some upgrades to the explore tab. He’s already evolved the trending tags from Twitter-specific to Anchor-specific. This way when you click on a hashtag, it’ll link to an anchor instead of a blank page. We’ll seek to incorporate Twitter again once we get more real time, active users.

My to do list consists of drafting our Kickstarter script. My mom met us for lunch to brainstorm some ideas. We originally went the emotional route tapping into tender moments of a lifetime such as a proposal, wedding, birth, and graduation. But we want our Kickstarter to be more memorable. More to come.

In the mean time, we’ll continue to refine and perfect this awesome app and prepare for a June Apple Store launch!