For the first time, Poparazzi is detailing the growth of its business, its future plans and its previously unconfirmed Benchmark-led Series A round. In its first year, the L.A.-area startup has seen over 5 million installs, with users mostly in the Gen Z demographic.
The startup says that 75% of its users are between the ages of 14 and 18. Over 100 million photos and videos have been shared on the app, and most of its users are U.S. based.
The app's competition is not really the established tech giants, as the startup positioned itself as an alternative. The newer set of social media apps are targeting a younger crowd. This group of apps believes that big tech is no longer the best place to connect with your friends. They all claim to offer that opportunity.
Some of these are ahead of Poparazzi. Yubo says it has seen 60 million sign-ups to date. According to Sensor Tower, BeReal has over 12 million downloads. Locket has seen over 18 million installs to date, while LiveIn has seen over 8 million installs. The estimates aren't an exact science, butSensor Tower sees over 4 million downloads for Poparazzi, which is in line with the startup's claims.
Poparazzi is taking to its website today to share its metrics and confirm its financing after a year of silence. It could be that it is hiring.
Poparazzi is an image.
Alex Ma, co-founder and CEO of Poparazzi, said that it took 3 years to get to this point. He and his brother went through several different routes to get to Poparazzi.
Poparazzi was the 11th or 12th app that we built. Alex says that the team realized that things weren't working and they made the decision to wind it down.
The co-founders decided that the best thing to do was to keep building and experimenting until they hit a home run. They tested a live texting app called Typo. They knew from the beginning that Poparazzi was something special. The app blew up among high school students who were testing it.
One of the core features of the app was to turn it into a stand-alone experience. In its case, photo tagging was the full focus.
Poparazzi is an image.
Users can create social profiles for photo-sharing purposes, but only your friends are allowed to post photos to them. That makes your friends your own, which is how the app got its name.
Alex says it started off like a novel, dumb idea. That was the big bet.
Poparazzi did a series of growth hacks to generate buzz for its app that drove downloads to launch. The app shot to the top of the App Store after it was launched.
Poparazzi hypes itself to the top of the App Store
It used the TikTok hype cycle to drive App Store preorders. The app would hit the Top Charts as soon as it became public, thanks to how the App Store ranks apps. Poparazzi implemented a screen that vibrates and buzzes your phone as it plays its video, something that helped generate word-of-mouth growth, as users took to social media to post about the unique experience.
The app bypassed some of the best practices around user privacy by requesting full access to users. It was possible to instantly match users to their friends based on stored phone numbers.
It overlooked the fact that many people, particularly women, store the phone numbers of abusers, stalkers and exes in their phone's contacts so they can use the phone's built-in tools to block the person. Poparazzi automatically matched people by phone number, so abusers could gain access to the user profiles of people they were trying to hurt.
Alex says Poparazzi has taken steps to address this, but explains the thinking around the original decision.
The social graph is hard to compete with, and the address book is the starting point for building a social app.
Poparazzi is an image.
Over the past year, the app has rolled out other new features, including the ability to block and report users, and it has invested in machine learning to detect things like nudity or hate speech. It has added the ability to upload from the camera roll, provided support for video, messaging, comments and caption, and introduced in-app challenges that encourage participation.
It is working to allow users to set their profiles to private and is planning a version of the app for the Android platform. Longer term, it may monetize via events or merchandise, not ads, but this is still largely to be determined.
The broad strokes of Poparazzi's A round were already known.
Newcomer reported in May of 2020 that Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel had led Poparazzi's Series A, which was worth approximately $20 million. Alex confirmed that Tavel joined the board and that the round was actually a Series A.
The company closed a $2 million seed round in late 2018, before Poparazzi was developed. The round was led by Floodgate and included other investors. We were unaware that former TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Bonatsos was among them. Floodgate's Ann Miura-Ko joined the board.
Alex says that Poparazzi has a runway of over 2 years.
Although some of the competition may be ahead of it, the startup believes in its potential because of its unique premise. It is not for performative social media.
Alex points out that it's not about yourself, but about the people.
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