New photo-sharing app Tappy on the rise
DYLAN BROCKMEYER
ASST. BUSINESS EDITOR
@dbrock08
Tappy introduces a new way for users to communicate.
The photo-sharing app Tappy is on the rise at University of San Diego. Tappy is similar to Instagram and Snapchat stories, allowing a user to take a photo with the high-definition quality trademark of Instagram and post it in Tappy; after 24 hours the photo disappears like a Snapchat.
USD alumnus Kyle Miller is the marketing coordinator and, with the rest of the team at Tappy, has been investigating how to make a more carefree approach to photo sharing.
“We want to make a carefree, pressure-free app,” Miller said. “One where you could share photos to select groups of people and you could chat about them, but it only lasts for 24 hours.”
Tappy is currently being funded by a venture capital group, Kleiner Perkins, and has been recently featured as one of the top new messaging apps in the App Store worldwide.
“Imagine kind of a group texting environment but with photos,” Miller said. “You send a photo to the group and they can chat about it, and they can send a photo to the group as well. It’s kind of back and forth.”
Tappy utilizes paid USD interns as spokespeople for the app, a unique strategy to market their company. Instead of using air-marketing pop-up ads on the internet, the hired interns help promote the importance of the company’s values of making this a user-friendly, close community-based app.
“We took a summer group for our pre-launch,” Miller said. “We went over strategies for once the app came out what we do with it.”
The team hosts events like “Tappy Hour” in the Pacific Beach area and has rented out the Beachcomber, knowing it is a popular bar for USD students.
“I think having USD interns is huge,” Miller said. “They’re all way different but for this app they’ve come together and kind of formed a dream team.”
One of Tappy’s interns is senior Alex Gigliotti. She became involved with the app through a friend and knew she wanted to get into the social media field.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” Gigliotti said. “We’ve been mostly planning events and getting more people to download the app because it’s more fun when more people are on it.”
USD is the first college to have a campus rep team for Tappy. The goal of the rep team is to inform the students about the app and get them using it.
“The main thing that we’re trying to go for is to get a steady group of college students using it here,” Gigliotti said. “If we start small on a college campus where a lot of people know each other it makes a bubble and then it just builds bubble on bubble between groups.”
The interns are vital to the continuing success of Tappy. They help the marketing team figure out what users want.
“What my big job was over the summer with the interns was to get a sense of what the people would use,” Miller said. “They got this user feedback that we could take and mold to get what the user wants.”
Tappy is aiming for the college-aged demographic and with a campus rep team like the one at USD it has been successful at building up its user community.
“We found out that our app is very community-based,” Miller said. “We chose the ground game, which no one chooses in apps. We have our interns that are going around and they get the feedback for us, they’re the ones hosting the events and getting their friends on the app. They’re building community which is what the app is all about.”