Building a Chat App: The Road Is Not an Overnight Success.
In January of 2023, I woke up in the middle of the night and texted my now co-founder. He was across the world in India winding down his vacation and getting excited to get back to the States. We both knew we wanted to work together on a project but were unsure of what to work on and that’s when I told him about ‘Worldchat’ the app-to-app text translation chat app.
To say he was excited was an understatement. He took the rest of his two weeks in India to research and try to figure out how we were going to do this. We decided to build in #reactnative as that gave us the ability to grow our app and team quickly.
In 2018 — I built an MVP, this was the logo:
We knew a few things;
- Needs a web
- Needs a mobile app.
The name “worldchat” wasn’t fun to say, catchy, or even exciting so we spent the first two weeks after he got back brainstorming ideas around names, which is when we ended up with “Gibber” from “gibberish” and our moto became “simplify communication”. We set out. He went and built out the web version (www.gibber.chat) and we got it hosted on AWS and used MongoDB and we hit the ground running. Our app was simple, you can sign up in any language you want (we offer 20) and you can read and write in any language you want.
For example, I can sign up in Hindi and my friend can sign up in French. They can read and write French and I get everything in Hindi. There it was — Communication, Simplified. Did you know over a billion people speak Mandarine Chinese, nearly 600 million people speak Hindi, and over 500 million people speak Spanish? The list goes on.
GIBBER WAS BORN!!
February — April 2023:
We built, and built, and built. The progress was slow. We figured out bugs for web, added users, tested, fixed, iterated, got the web version stable.
Some analytics:
May 2023:
I took a drastic step, I decided to grow the team from 2 to 12 for a summer internship program AND go mobile-first.
Posted an internship role on LinkedIn, weeded out potential developers that would be good for the team aaaaand ta-da! we had a team. We had a team of 6 developers and that’s when things started to get crazy. We didn’t have a structure, no solidified roadmap, no engineering schedule, it was the wild west. We collected ideas on trello but no follow-up.
Some analytics:
June 2023 — September 2023:
Going into June I realized I needed two product managers. To manage two big teams. So I went the same route, posted on LinkedIn, wedded out candidates, and ultimately brought on two product managers! They became a ray of sunshine in a potential storm coming.
Both the product managers aligned our goals and got us focused which got us to publish our first version of gibber on the Apple App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gibber-communicate-easily/id1421570450)
Some analytics:
October — November 2023:
Verticles. Verticles. Verticles. We went into focusing on product focus. We’re now working on a Sports integration and a unique one-of-a-kind chat app feature called ‘In-Chat Threads”.
‘In-Chat Threads”
We believe it’s going to be a game-changer. Most chat apps these days are single threads & that works out quite well for some cases. Most conversations these days are multi-folded. We often have multiple conversations and then we sit around relying on the search feature to figure out what we said at what time. In-chat threads change the game. Users will now have the ability to create sub-chats with subject lines to make it clear what the chat is about. Now any 1–on-1 chat and group chat can plan a vacation, plan weekly dinners, camping trips, weddings, parties, sports games, and more. The application of in-chat threads is only limited to what our imagination is and can’t wait to see what our users do with it.
Some analytics:
So here we are, November 1st — with 2 product managers, 10 developers, and a rock-solid team ready to take on the world. Here is a look at our Google Analytics for year 2023 so far:
