Come join us, we are hiring! Not really . . .
#ProgrammingProblems
Was the tag I left on one of my Instagram photos over a year ago. I was on a mission to teach myself how to code and I had shared a photo of the mess I had written. What happened next may have changed my life.
“HA! It will be alright. Keep working!”
Dhruv said.
Dhruv, a 24 year old mobile developer from India and one my closest friends, had searched the hashtag #ProgrammingProblems and came across my photo. What made him leave the comment on my photo is something I will never understand. What could I, a Black American and him an Indian have in common? It turns out, EVERYTHING! Well, maybe not everything (He loves Game of Thrones/I hate it). We exchanged Skype ID’s and our first conversation was about the HBO show Silicon Valley. The next day he helped me fix my errors and helped me compile my code. Since then, there has not been a person I have spoken with more consistently over the past nine months than Dhruv. We began as strangers, he became my tutor, then an employee, then Blastchat’s technical advisor and is now one of my closest friends.
I mention my friend Dhruv to attack the Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak prerequisite that most investors look for in founding teams. One question I am sick of hearing from investors is,
“How long have you and the founders known each other and what have you built in the past?”
No, my team did not build a black box or anything similar but I am confident that we will find ways to make Blastchat work. My partner Darrian and I have been hustling relentlessly for the past six months. I’ve known Darrian Collins for over six years and growing up we didn’t have fancy computers to hack projects together on, but we did have a $12 basketball and a free black top court. That leather ball and black top court united us and we have been friends ever since. Darrian was my first beta tester when I released the MVP for Blastchat. After using it for two days and understanding my vision for the company, he texted me every day for a month asking to be on the team. Kaya Thomas, another advisor, is CS student at Dartmouth College and is one of the brightest and hardest working people I know. Dhruv is by far the most logically person I know and I have spent nearly two years on an IVY League campus where I met many smart people. And myself, this is my third startup in the past six years. I am hungry and I refuse to give up until I build something that will make the lives of people better. We are a wonderful bunch, but I know our community/team is far from being complete.
Having pursued a graduate degree in globalization studies from Dartmouth College, I understand how connected our world is economically and more important, socially. With this said, we have decided to build a small community from all over the world of smart and hard working people that share our vision at Blastchat.
Here is a bit of information about Blastchat and our vision:
While at Dartmouth last fall, I wanted to play tennis with a friend. I needed to contact all of my friends on campus that I thought would be interested in playing. Here were my options:
- I could have posted a Facebook post or tweeted something saying “Anyone down to play tennis today? After lunch, maybe?”.
- Send one big group message to all of my friends asking if anyone wanted to play tennis.
- Copy & paste this message “Hey What’s up? Down for some tennis today?” and sending it to twenty or so different people.
The problem with the first option is my friends lack of daily usage of Facebook and Twitter. I’d be surprised if they used it more than once a week and if they did use it, their feeds will be full of a bunch of buzzfeed articles, leaving my post hidden forever, possibly. The problem with the second option is all of my friends not knowing each other. There is nothing more annoying than being in a group chat with and unknown person — it sucks! The third option is definitely something that I will never do in my life, sending the same message to multiple people. It is too much work and too time consuming.
I figured there had to be an easier and more effective way for me to get in contact with as many friends as I want in real time. There had to be a place where I could send one message to as many friends as I want and receive individual responses from them all. That’s when I thought of the idea for Blastchat, the most effective and simple mass messaging platform.
We have two main features and here is how they work.
Blastchat Private
You search through your Blastchat contacts list and decide who you want to blast content or messages to. After you select the recipients you can send text, photos, videos, links or gifs. All recipients will receive your blast in real time with a push notification and reply individually by using iMessage while in the Blastchat app. So the conversation starts on Blastchat and continues in your native messaging app. (For now)
Now that I have Blastchat, I can blast this same message “Anyone down to play tennis today? After lunch, maybe?” and get immediate responses from friends.
Blastchat Public
I then realized how important Blastchat can be for people who want to share real time content with their audience, most importantly, celebrities, bloggers, and marketers. So we created Blastchat Public. Blastchat Public allows you to send no reply, real time content to your followers. This is similar to no reply marketing emails or newsletters. We noticed that our generations rarely sign up for email newsletters and as a result of this, bloggers, marketers or celebs have to resort to noisy platforms like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook to ship content to their audience.
Gary Vaynerchuk
The social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk uses Instagram to tell his audience when new episodes of his show has been released. He then directs them to his profile and click on a Facebook link that takes them to his videos which are on Youtube. On Blastchat he would be able to send an image or snippet of his video, send the link and press blast. His audience will receive his content seconds after. This will save his audience time and make the connection more personal.
Kyrie Irving
One celebrity that is taking advantage of this direct connection to his fans is Cleveland Cavalier’s All Start PG Kyrie Irving. He has amassed nearly 200 followers on Blastchat and sends blast to his fans at least once per week. Ironically enough he was also one of the first athletes to use Twitter to connect with his fans while in high school back in 2009. This was when he had less than 1 thousand twitter followers — now he has close to 3 million. The Kyrie Irving Model. He seems to get it!
“When Kyrie sends me blast, and I get the push notification, it feels as if he is messaging me directly and individually. That feels cool.” — user #75
At the core of Blastchat is the belief that people should not have search through noisy platforms for the most important content and information they care about, that content and information should be sent directly to the them, in real time! Our revenue model will be similar to Craigslist revenue model. (Can explain more if you are interested in working with us).
Growth
The coolest part about this is the fact that users love the product and we are growing. Here is a chart of the growth in the past month. (MAU)
We have decided to abandon fundraising completely and focus solely on building the team and community. We are looking to build a team and community of anyone who shares our vision. It does not matter if you are black, white, brown, purple, gay, trans, adult, teen(WE HIGHLY ENCOURAGE TEENS TO JOIN) atheist or religious — we welcome you. It doesn’t matter what your skill or lack of skill is. All we ask is that you are willing to hustle and have a desire to learn and grow with us.
If interested, send us an email: info@blastch.at — twitter:@blastchat — instagram:@blastchat
S/o to our newest member and first Student Ambassador: Bryce Aiken!
Blasting off!!
-Jhamar
