Forget invite-only social applications, Blunder is actually evaluating a brand new approach to get its own individuals: It obliges you to welcome your pals to get in. The reinvention of a social cam application to begin with presented in 2021, Blunder is actually currently master of the U.S. Application Outlet after having actually dived coming from No. 118 Total previously this month to reach out to No. 1. The application delivers a comparable knowledge to various other mobile phone applications that tried to take on the non-reusable cam knowledge, like Dispo and also Later Camera, along with some tweaks. Yet some state its own brand new effectiveness has actually been actually obtained through ill-gotten means.
Growth-hacking procedures prevail at presents, along with lots of applications counting on TikTok social video clips to assist their application go popular, at that point go up the Application Outlet graphes. Others produce requirement through restricting accessibility to their application like Club as soon as performed throughout its own prime time or even currently the Twitter/X competition Bluesky is actually carrying out, which viewed its own welcomes costing numerous bucks on ebay.com.
But Lapse is doing something different with its invites. Instead of just gating its app to only those with an invite, it’s actually requiring users to invite friends in order to start using its features.
This concept comes from co-founders and brothers Dan and Ben Silvertown, who said they were originally inspired to build Lapse following an experience they had when traveling using a point-and-shoot camera to disconnect and unwind. They wanted to bring a similar experience to the mobile app market with an app that recreated that idea by allowing users to take pictures with delayed viewing and share them with a group of friends.
However, the version of Lapse that launched in 2021 is no more.
Dan tells TechCrunch the team noticed the app’s most avid users had begun to use it as more of a photo journal rather than the disposable party camera they intended. So they worked on a new version of Lapse over the past year and and a half that works to address that need.
The app retains its disposable camera mimicry, where snaps “develop” at random later in the day, but the focus is now on curating photos into albums and creating user profiles featuring your monthly photo dumps.
The company trialed the new version of the app using TikTok ads during its stealth phase and then launched it to the public in June 2023. Dan claims that 100% of the app’s recent growth is organic. Yet we’d argue that depends on your definition of the term.
The app features a slick onboarding experience where it presents a fairly lengthy mini-movie with haptics to get you excited about its capabilities. It also verifies users with a phone number, asks for permission to your contacts and camera, and then forces you to add at least five friends before you’re able to use Gap.
An informational pop-up in the app explains you have to send out invites because Lapse only works with friends, and that your invites will give your friends early access.
However, not everyone is actually a fan of this format.
Explains Sheel Mohnot, a VC at Better Tomorrow Ventures, this process will send a text message to your friends to download the app. “I felt dirty,” he wrote on X. “It got to the top of the App Store on a pyramid scheme.”
He’s not alone along with that criticism, as others have called out Lapse’s onboarding as “pretty annoying to spam my friends.”
Even Dan admits that Lapse’s onboarding is controversial.
“Our onboarding process is divisive, there are a few detractors but also many fans,” he says. “We are top of the charts because Lapse is resonating with young people, who are sharing millions of photos per day in our app. They are exhausted by existing photo-sharing apps and Lapse is a way for them to live in the moment and share memories pressure-free,” Dan added.
The reality is the text-your-friends invite mode is an old growth hack and one that remains controversial. TechCrunch was writing about SMS invite spam seven years ago when the then-culprit was another photo app called Everalbum. The following year, users got played again by another social app, Gather. This stuff is old hat!
More recently, another photo-sharing app, Poparrazzi, hyped itself to No. 1 on the App Store in 2021 using a combination of growth hacks, including those that comprised user privacy by requiring full address book access, then immediately matching your contacts’ phone numbers to existing users and then having you automatically follow them. As users found themselves following exes they had blocked, they were not happy.
Poparrazi shut down earlier this year.
Where Lapse differs is that it doesn’t spam your friends without your consent, unlike some older apps. When you tap to “invite your friends” you know what you’re getting yourself into, so to speak.
The system, for whatever it’s worth, appears to be working in the near term. According to data from market intelligence firm data.ai, Lapse has close to 1.2 million installs worldwide, with the U.S. accounting for 92% of those. The app has also climbed to No. 1 from its own earlier Overall rank of No. 118 since September 10.
Lapse in 2021 announced a mega-seed round of $11 million from investors including Octopus Ventures, GV, Speedinvest, and individuals, including an early Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo, who was on the team that built the “like” button. Speedinvest tells us the app has raised $12 million to date and confirms the new version of the app is seeing incredible growth “without spending any marketing budget.”
But now that Lapse has acquired users and attention, it faces a much harder test — convincing its own individuals to stay and remain engaged. It remains to be seen if it can turn its own hype right into a business when others have certainly not.
