ANALYSIS:
If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, it’s another social messaging app. From Facebook Messenger and Snapchat onto WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, and beyond, it’s safe to say that most bases are covered.
Right? Well, maybe.
A new startup launched out of stealth in the U.K. this week, with a mission to become the “next-generation social networking and messaging platform.” The company plans to gradually roll the service out across Europe from next month before landing in the U.S. afterwards this year.
Yubl (rhymes with “bubble”) is a mobile-first (natch) service available on Android and iOS. As with other existing social apps, you can connect with friends using simple text-based messages and photos. However, Yubl lets you do much more than that — it serves up a blank canvas for users to create something entirely new from scratch.
You can choose a background color, throw in some photos and videos from your camera roll, move them around, graffiti over the top, change the fonts, plaster some stickers … you get the idea.
However, besides being able to create pretty pictures or visual monstrosities, you can also build interactive buttons to solicit opinions from your buddies — “what shirt should I buy?”, “pizza or sushi?”, and so on.
So what you end up with could look a little something like this: Everyone in the group sees the same thing and can convey their feelings about a certain topic of discussion.
Above: Yubl
There are three main areas to Yubl. “Private” is for one-on-one or group chats for those who have been invited to join.
“Public” is, as its name suggests, an open forum to search for Yubls shared across the entire social network, be it your own friends and followers or celebrities and brands. And it’s this area that gives the biggest hint as to how Yubl plans to monetize — it's struck deals with some well-known companies, including Red Bull, Starbucks, and ASOS, which will interact and publish content through the app. The third area is “Explore,” which is essentially for finding content, brands, creators, and celebrities to follow on Yubl.
Though more will be added in the future, for launch there are five interactive buttons available: Vote, Count, WebLink, Whereabouts, and Pinpoint.
Above: Yubl Pinpoint
The latter two are particularly useful for group meetups, as they let you ask friends where they are, who in turn can react simply by pressing a button to post their location on a map that’s visible to everyone in the group. Similarly, you can place a pin on a map to show where to meet at a future time.
That’s Yubl in a nutshell, at least.
Road to big things?
VentureBeat was given a demo of the app and its functions in London the previous month, and the most immediately striking facet of the app was the incredible amount of attention to detail. It was slick and ridiculously well-planned, with all the necessary letters dotted and crossed. It was clear that this wasn’t another fly-by-night startup bootstrapped through weekend bar work.
Indeed, the company has been testing the app in universities around the U.K., worked with focus groups to garner feedback, and topped-and-tailed the app in preparation for the big launch.
Upon further probing, it transpired the app was more than two years in the making, and the firm already had more than 60 employees and £15 million ($20 million) in private financial backing. For a prelaunch startup, that’s pretty staggering.
Among the founding team is Gareth Evans, who was previously the founder and CEO of a communications company called Synergy, acquired by DDB in 2011.
“Yubl has been built for today’s users and their needs — we’ve created something that encompasses everything people love about mobile technology and much more,” said Evans. “It delivers a richer, more engaging, and hassle-free way to communicate by bringing users closer together with friends, interesting content, and their favourite brands and personalities. The only limit is their own imagination.”
Also involved is Jonathan Ellis, cofounder of a company called Psygnosis, which designed and published games such as Lemmings more than 25 years ago. Psygnosis was acquired by Sony in 1993, a deal that was to be the genesis for the Sony PlayStation two years afterwards.
Big backers, big money, big attention to detail. So does this mean that Yubl is destined for big things? Maybe. However, there is something that doesn’t quite sit right about a product that has been so cautiously planned. That may sound counterintuitive, however, when you look at all the great social apps of our time — Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp — they all got off the ground with little money or fanfare, and minimal market research. However, above all else, they all became established organically, through a mixture of scrappy execution, word of mouth, and luck — being in the right place at the right time.
Completely ignoring what the product is, what it does, and who it’s aimed at, I've my doubts that something that has been so meticulously “figured out” in advance can truly take off in a big way. That’s not to say it won’t, of course. Yubl isn’t aimed at people like me — someone who still remembers making plans for a night out without the luxury of a mobile phone. Yubl is aimed at millennials, those who’ve grown up not knowing a world without mobile phones.
All things considered, there’s never any surefire way of knowing whether an app will resonate with the global masses. I was among the first people to write about Snapchat back in 2012 — I thought it was a quirky and fun little app, however, if you’d told me at the time it would go on to become one of the major social messaging apps of our time, I would’ve laughed in your face.