[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Stipop (YC S21) - Improving user engageme...
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Launch HN: Stipop (YC S21) - Improving user engagement with
stickers
Hi HN, I'm Tony, and together with my friend Daniel, we created
Stipop (https://developers.stipop.io). We help app developers add
stickers on chat, comment section, profiles, and live streams by
providing an easy-to-install SDK with 150K+ stickers and a fully
customizable UI. Stickers are the big, animated emojis you can
send in chat. This may sound silly and of course, it is, but a lot
of people love them. They are sent 17x more than GIFs on Facebook
Messenger--that's almost 400M times a day! Users, especially Gen Z
and Millennials, love sending stickers to express themselves better
and stay more connected online. But the thing is, having stickers
in your app can cost up to a million dollars because you'll need a
good 4~5 engineers to build the infrastructure, UI, search engine
_and_ have a content team to sign contracts with hundreds of
sticker artists, send payouts and make regular updates every month.
We wanted to solve this problem. We used to operate our own
sticker app for iMessage. That's when we first gathered all the
artists and knowledge about the stickers. Now, after 4 years, we
have 5,000 artists from 35 countries. We hit 200k users before we
pivoted to B2B. Back then, we attended TC Disrupt, and many
startups came to us asking if they could use our stickers. So we
came back, released API, and got our first customers. Now with
Stipop, any app developer can install stickers in just a single
day. Stipop SDK has a pre-built UI, so you don't have to design
anything by yourself. It also comes with two layouts: a sticker
search engine to search for stickers with keywords and a library
mode where users can browse and download stickers. We found that
stickers apply to many different app types too. For example, Fingo
Africa (YC S21) is a neobank. They are adding stickers to their
money-sending feature, so their users can soon send stickers to say
thank you instead of just transferring money or send a relevant
sticker like pizza to split bills after eating a pizza together.
TripTime used stickers for user profile images. We are also on
Microsoft Teams to help users search for stickers to send in chats,
Blabla live-streaming chat, and soon to be on Canva to provide
stickers for image editing and designs. Our sticker end-users show
a stable 40% 8-week retention and helped apps increase user
engagement by up to 17%. We provide the service for free and plan
to turn freemium next year. We monetize by creating custom stickers
for brands like Coca-Cola. Please let me know if you have any
questions, feedback, or ideas. Your thoughts would greatly help us
improve the product! You can also take a look at our demo video
here: https://link.stipop.io/3Epl9LI. Thank you!
Author : tonyatkc
Score : 23 points
Date : 2021-12-02 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
| tommoor wrote:
| Hey, looks interesting! What's the business model? I think you
| might need to be more upfront about that on your site.
| motoxpro wrote:
| "We provide the service for free and plan to turn freemium next
| year. We monetize by creating custom stickers for brands like
| Coca-Cola."
| nerdponx wrote:
| > We provide the service for free and plan to turn freemium
| next year. We monetize by creating custom stickers for brands
| like Coca-Cola.
|
| Seems reasonable.
|
| But I wonder if there is a way to slide some kind of shady user
| tracking into this system. Maybe Stipop will figure out how to
| track end users, and sell that data as an extra revenue stream.
| politician wrote:
| Tangentially related: does anyone know of a vendor offering
| YouTube-style comments and live/super chat as a service?
| icy wrote:
| CometChat comes to mind. https://cometchat.com
| tonyatkc wrote:
| Oh yes, and there's Stipop docs on CometChat too.
| https://www.cometchat.com/docs/extensions/stickers-stipop
| politician wrote:
| Thank you!
| option_greek wrote:
| Any open source options similar to comet chat (but obviously
| may be with less functionality) ?
| eatonphil wrote:
| Super neat! Years ago after first seeing Kakaotalk I thought
| about offering the same kind of service. But the service idea
| also seemed ridiculous to me at the time. I like the way you're
| doing it!
|
| And I'm not sure why it's taken so long for stickers to come to
| the US when they've been so popular in Korea at least (dunno if
| they're as popular in other East Asian countries).
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(page generated 2021-12-02 23:03 UTC)