Typost app
In 2013 I founded Typost, a mobile tool for designing typographic posts and placing them across channels, years before Stories or Canva's mobile rise. Built in 3 months and launched on the App Store, it reached 2,400 active users with zero marketing, and was discontinued when I couldn't raise. The failure taught me more than most launches.
The gap
The year was 2013, Marketing was moving into the digital realm and web typography just became possible a few years earlier, and small businesses were caught in the middle: they needed designed posts, ads, and banners across channels, but the existing tools were time-consuming and hiring designers or marketers was simply out of their price range.
Typost's promise: a radically simple mobile tool, essentially two buttons, to design a typographic post and place it online. No designer, no agency.
Solo build
As a solo founder I hired a team of developers to build the MVP and took on everything else myself: business plan, pitch decks, user flows, interaction design, and demonstrating behaviours and animations for the developers.
The constraint was the strategy: three months from conception to a shippable proof of concept, launched lean to build a user base and raise funding.
Typost launched on the App Store in July 2013, three months after its conception, and gained 2,400 active users within a few months, without any marketing. In 2014 it won Crowd's Favourite at GSMA's Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai. The plan was to use the MVP as proof of concept, build a user base, and raise investment. I failed to raise, and without funding the app was discontinued.
With a decade of hindsight, the diagnosis is clear: I built a tool without a social network behind it. When Stories arrived, they validated the exact behaviour of fast, typographic, mobile-first visual posts, but they had built-in reach; Typost had none. Canva won the other flank with a far deeper product. The thesis was right; the distribution was missing. Products need a reason to spread, and that lesson has shaped how I evaluate every product bet since.
User figure: internal App Store data, 2013. Event: GSMA Mobile Asia Expo 2014, Shanghai.