I took my biggest learnings from Life Lapse and made a new app, Zoomyy.
As promised, I want to share more of my entrepreneurial journey here. Since launching Life Lapse 11 months ago, I have a learned A LOT. I have to say, my biggest breakthroughs are when I get some serious rejection which results to me usually crying. I'm quickly learning to grow thick skin, not take things so personally and see rejection as more of an opportunity. My biggest takeaway with Life Lapse is that it takes a lot of work to make a video. According to a recent survey I sent out, people download the app, then have no idea what to do with it. Fully aware of this fact after launching Life Lapse with zero user testing, I have been working diligently to educate users on how to create cool videos using Life Lapse and that it doesn't have to be hard. The reality of the fact is, you need to go out and shoot to create a video.
A majority of my time will still be focussed on Life Lapse, however, I wanted to apply all these learnings to create a VERY SIMPLE app (with little investment), that requires essentially no effort from the end user. You can literally create videos with this new app while watching Netflix from your couch. I've been closely watching the statistics of how many people use Instagram stories (myself very much included) and saw a massive opportunity. (250 MILLION Daily active users). I've noticed people are getting more and more creative with IG stories. They're using other apps to tell their story and stand out using other tools than just what's offered by Instagram.
After searching for an app in the spring to compliment one of my Life Lapse videos, I noticed there wasn't one out there that existed for what I needed. I was looking for an app that applies a "Kens Burns Effect" to my videos, there were a couple that existed, but none that did it with video clips - just photos and they were very limited. This got my wheels turning and Zoomyy was born.
Rather than my regular approach of telling everybody under the sun about what I'm doing (lol), I wanted to be more strategic this time. I did more research before deciding to go through with the idea. The app took about 1 month to build and I did a VERY soft launch to see how the app would do with zero traction. Then I got user feedback, made improvements to the app, then did a couple of campaigns to get lots of traction quickly and now we are here....I'm sharing about it publicly, finally!! I actually hate keeping secrets so it feels to get this out there to the world.
So what is Zoomyy? Designed specifically for Instagram Stories, it takes a photo or up to 15 second video clip and adds a zoom motion to it. See the video below for examples. You may be thinking, why not just use Instagram "superzoom" feature? Because you can't zoom in on a photo, only on videos. And the zoom has to happen while you're recording, not after you're shooting. So if you wanted to add the zoom motion to a time-lapse or stop motion video, you'd have to do it on your computer. With Zoomyy, you can have a one zoom or mirrored zoom (it zooms in one direction, then halfway through, switches direction).
Top 3 Life Lapse Learnings I'm applying to Zoomyy
- Create a super niche app that anybody can use with their existing clips
- Do user testing before officially launching
- Having the app straight up paid instead of freemium model
