Pictures are powerful

After helping lots of other entrepreneurs work on their iPhone and Android apps at the time, my partners and I at User10 decided to work on an app of our own. It’s hard to think back to what the app ecosystem was like in 2013, but it was still very early. Instagram had already blown up, but they didn’t have “stories” yet, nor did Snapchat.

So, while we were “ahead” of our time in that regard, we just didn’t have the critical mass necessary for the product we were building. That’s one reason we started going down the picture book route and working some partnership angles with companies like Shutterfly and Photobucket.

In the end, though, it became clear that building a mobile, social app was more of a Silicon Valley game than a Phoenix metro game to be played then. I’m grateful for the time we had creating this platform and learned a lot in the process.

More importantly, it served as the springboard that led to the dinner which resulted in the launch of #yesphx.