KickChat

KickChat is my baby that I’ve been unlucky with many attempts to run away and start a new life without it.

Last summer I decided I’m better than every other computer science college student and could jump right into freelancing.

I had about 4 years of part-time iOS development experience, and I could build just about any iPhone app that people threw at me.

Me, being the ignorant college kid, didn’t even consider for a second that there might be other skills associated with building apps for clients other than being good at programming.

I started out a lot of conversations with potential clients by telling them the price. None of them had any idea how much time and effort it took to get an app out there.

When I dropped the ball and told them they would have to spend 10,000$ to get any type of prototype going, there never was nearly enough belief in me to warrant that type of commitment.

I was just some college kid who had a mildly successful iPhone game(another story for another time).

How do I solve this problem? Well, I’ll just put out an app that they can all look at to showcase my abilities. I looked at the app Meetup. Good idea for an app, terrible design. I can just redesign Meetup and showcase that to clients.

What should it be called?

Meetapp!

Ya, the original name for KickChat was meetapp… pretty stupid, but I just wanted any name to show clients.

I started building meetapp in my basement “office”. My “office” consisted of the free desk my neighbour gave me when I first moved in, a 40$ 4 foot by 4 foot carpet, the cheapest office chair from Walmart and a blue curtain separating the “ugly” part of my basement from my office.

Being in the ideal environment for innovation, my entrepreneurial side started to kick in.

“What if I just changed this a bit?”

If I just made these changes I could make meetapp my own app and not a shitty redesign of meetup.

Ok cool! I’ll just throw this new app out there, make a couple posts about it on reddit and hope for the best!

One of the first critiques I got for Meetapp was how ugly it was😬. I needed to redesign my redesigned app.

I called in the big guns. My friend Dom was a recent graduate of design school and was moving back out to the island.

I offered him a share of the freelancing profits if he were to work on Meetapp with me. He accepted, and a year later now I really have no idea why he did that.

We redesigned the app, and the compliments started rolling in about how good it looked.

The next issue we were running into was no one was using the app(pretty big issue 😂). The way the first version of Meetapp was, meant it was useless unless there were already hundreds of people using it.

We needed something to go viral, just to test out if the app was even useful or not.

My solution was to fake conversations in Meetapp and post them on reddit. This worked incredibly well. One post getting upwards of 400 upvotes.

We now had interest in the app.. (to be continued)