Bobble the sticker app for all fun lovers

By Subhiksha Ganesan

Posted on October 18, 2016

Bobble gives that fascinating moment to see our self in the form of stickers

It was all fun and play, fascinated by the meteoric rise of mobile messaging. When the team hit on the idea for Bobble, they had already been toying with multiple prototypes. Post releasing Bobble on Google Play Store, they reached the #1 position in few weeks and have stayed there ever since. By now, Bobble enjoys a cult-like following on school and college campuses across India.

Pre bobble, the team was working on a different product Touchtalent with an aspiration to build a truly global product focused on mobile interactions. The Eureka moment was in Feb 2015 when they tested an early prototype. Now they are proud of the hockey stick growth to more than 5 million downloads in less than one year.

A Team in need is a Team indeed

Mohd. Wassem, the founder of Bobble, studied at Delhi University and has worked for 10 years as an HR consultant, professor and a social entrepreneur. He always been fascinated with interacting with people of all ages and walks of life. While exploring an ed-tech start-up in 2010, he met Ankit Prasad, cofounder, at IITD who was a sophomore. Since then, they have interacted closely and brainstormed ideas. . Their core team includes highly capable and driven individuals.

• Ankit Prasad the co-founder, dropped out of his Computer Science and Engineering course at IIT-Delhi to grow Bobble.
• Gaurav Srivastava- Development Lead is a Computer Science engineer from NIT Allahabad.
• Rahul Prasad- R&D, Backend, Design is a Computer Science engineer from Sikkim Manipal and has experience of scaling multiple start ups.
• Amit Kumar- Android Lead is a Civil Engineer from IIT BHU and a top ranked developer at GitHub.
• Ankit Gupta- UI/UX Lead: UX Design Immersive at General Assembly New York.
• Harshal Mehra is into Strategic Partnerships. He holds an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad.

More than half of the team stays together on campus. If there’s an urgency, which is almost always the case, team huddles can happen even at 3am. Work hours at Bobble are truly flexible where they have a culture of high trust and unstinting focus on delivering an excellent product.

One Proud Technology that has reached Million People so far

Bobble has noticed an enormous growth since the start. So far Bobble app has 5 Million Downloads, 100 Million Direct shares, 30 Million Faces created, 12 Minutes Average user time per day and has secured the no.1 place in ‘Stickers’ category. Globally, there is no technology invented to enable real time personalization of content. The app enables highly personal self-expression on mobile and converts user’s selfie to hundreds of stickers with the user’s face and customizable text. The input text for stickers can be in any language. Bobble is proud to say that no other product in the world has such technology.

Feel like you are in the Sticker World

Bobble is planning to generate revenue by licensing their tech to large platforms where, messaging, Live Streaming, Games, Social Platforms & Keyboards values are added. Also, there are huge avenues for monetization by inserting brands in mobile conversations. Bobble can make users engage deeply with brands. Consider this example:

• Someone types this message for a friend on a chat platform- ‘Let’s go have coffee’
• The chat platform could use Bobble’s tech for converting this text to stickers where the sender is shown holding a cup of coffee.
• Each such sticker could carry branding from Carlsberg, Heineken etc.
• When users of the chat platform share these branded stickers, they would have a personal stake in the brand’s success because it’s their face on the sticker with the brand’s logo.
• Each such sticker is an impression for that brand, and would generate revenue to be shared between Bobble and the chat platform.

Integration and Partnerships

So far, they have already worked with multiple brands like Tinder, YourStory, Zomato, media houses like Eros Now and sporting events like the IPL. Currently they are working with some major movie production houses for their upcoming movies. Bobble is the only app from India to be featured on iMessage app store in dozens of other countries in Asia and Europe including India. Also, the team is planning to go live inside Simeji, a product from Baidu that will roll out Bobble’s functionalities by integrating SDK. In fact, Baidu has renamed their keyboard as Facemoji, and will highlight Bobble as the USP of their product.

Big Fat Investors

Bobble is not labour intensive and feels fortunate to have more than a dozen angel investors. They include industry stalwarts like Sachin and Binny Bansal of Flipkart, Deep Kalra of Makemytrip, Amit Ranjan of SlideShare, Prashant Malik of Limeroad, Prashant Tandon of HealthKart. Bobble raised funding from SAIF Partners, a prominent VC, in Sep 2015.

Experience Bobble at Bobble’s store

• Bobble is an Android and IoS app to make mobile conversations more expressive and personal. Their USP is real-time personalization of content; with users’ own faces and relevant text.

• The journey started as a selfie-based sticker app. Users can click a selfie, and get unlimited stickers with their face.

• Subsequently, they released the keyboard as a distribution channel. For instance, a user can send Bobble’s content while chatting on Whatsapp and there is no necessity to switch between the Whatsapp conversation and Bobble.

• In real time, Bobble’s technology adjusts the expression on every face to match the emotion of the sticker. Also, the face tone of each head is adjusted to match with sticker body and theme.

• All text on stickers is customizable by users in any language. Personalized content is recommended to users based on the tone and tenor of the input text, through a self-learning algorithm.

• All the contents on Bobble is free of cost. Users can download as much content as they wish from the ‘Bobble Store’.

• Subsequently, they have been extending the technology by incorporating new content formats to product philosophy of self-expression; colourful and expressive fonts have been added as a feature.

Bobble’s Future play

With Jio’s aggressive launch, mobile internet access will become cheaper, faster and more reliable. Devices will get cheaper and better too. This will expand their Total Addressable Market in India. They even have plans of adding more regional languages content to the keyboard. They aspire to be present in one among every three mobile messages across all Android and IoS devices. Bobble has partnered with Foxconn and Mech Mocha. With just a single selfie as input, users can play as themselves in the game, and also share their personalized stickers with their friends.

Bobble the sticker app for all fun lovers