Inventing in Public

Our goal at Universe is to empower all of us to create in entirely new ways.

After a year and a half, 3 internal versions of our product, and a solidified team, we’re manifesting this vision in public. The app is live (in fact, it was just featured on the App Store an hour ago 😊).

What is Universe? It’s a breakthrough new canvas for your phone. We distilled the process of designing and programming a “screen” into a simple yet open-ended 3x5 grid.

But it’s not done. Far from it. It’s still too hard to create something great. You can’t share your verses outside of Universe. And it’s missing social infrastructure like profiles and comments.

Rather than spending months more developing internally, we’re going to build it out in public, in front of all of you.

I believe we are on the precipice of a second era in mobile, similar to the “Web 2.0” era of the late 2000s. This will be defined by a shift from the “big launch” approach to an iterative, build-in-public model.

With 2.5+ billion smartphone users, the opportunities on mobile remain enormous. But in 2016, the playbook for building and growing a consumer mobile company is unclear.

Why? The first era of mobile companies were “low hanging fruit”: obvious ideas, translations of desktop products, enterprise solutions. The distribution model for apps was inspired by the platform they lived on — perfectly formed ideas with make-or-break launch moments.

That ecosystem has matured, making distribution exceedingly difficult. But it has led the way for a new, iterative way of building. There are new tools — Swift, Realm, CloudKit, BuddyBuild — that make development faster, smarter, and easier. There’s more mobile talent. And, app review time is down from 2 weeks to 1 day. More users have enabled auto-update, which means that you can push updates on a daily basis.

Zooming out, Snapchat kicked off an era of fundamentally novel, truly mobile-first companies. The playbooks for these companies are being written in real time. The thing with exploring wild new ideas is that you can’t conceive them entirely internally and then unveil them — there’s a limit to the creativity inherent to that model. Radical innovation happens when inventions compound, which is the premise of iterative development. Products begin as seeds and unfurl over time. Consider where Snapchat started and where it is now.

We’re excited to have you on this journey with us.

1 day later: We just released Backdrops, which make creating far easier and more fun. Read more about the update here.