Yapper group chat app: a smartphone-based block party

It started out with a typical college boy moment: Justin Lichtenstaedter and Rob Wyant wanted to invite some girls over.
Well, that’s not exactly how they put it.
It was “springtime,” Lichtenstaedter recalled, a “beautiful day out,” and “we’re hanging out on Rob’s roof.”
Lichtenstaedter suddenly felt an urge to share the moment: “I wish we could send a message to everyone nearby and ask, ‘Do you want to come out?'”
That’s how the two classmates, then George Washington University MBA students, envisioned an app that could bring people together in a location-based group chatroom.
Their first try at designing Yapper, was more “yeesh” than “yesssss.”
“The app was terrible,” said Lichtenstaedter. “We were still looking for our niche.”
Though it gathered about 2,500 users, it took too long to load and ultimately flopped. “It didn’t have the stickiness factor,” said Wyant.
But the student entrepreneurs, who’ve now graduated and set up shop in the downtown incubator space 1776, were not to be defeated.
They raised a $190,000 family-and-friends round to build the Yapper they’d been yearning for.
The new version of the free app, approved by the App Store (the Android version will be released in the coming months) on Jan. 10, presents a smooth interface that allows users to browse through location-based chatrooms and events happening in the vicinity.
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You’d better try it out now before it goes mainstream.
Yapper will be featured prominently as the official app of the Washington, DC Economic Partnership’s SXSW 2015 initiative.
Hopefully, other festival goers, sponsors and event coordinators will also latch on to Yapper.
“Our app was built for a festival like that,” said Wyant.
A hectic event with “so much noise and so much happening,” Lichtenstaedter added, should present a need for an an integrated platform that can deliver information on nearby events plus the opportunity to communicate directly with organizers and share one’s experience in a chatroom.
Down the road, Lichtenstaedter, the CEO and Wyant, the president, also plan on creating an additional source of revenue by renting out their API to other companies.
At this stage, modesty is still de rigueur — and yet, their hopes are high. “Would we like to blow up at SXSW? Absolutely,” said Lichtenstaedter. But, he added, “It’s not something we’re banking on.”