You could call cappuccino the anti-clubhouse, but the company has been working on its app concept for a few years – its CEO doesn’t have a strong opinion on clubhouse. And it’s true that cappuccino is an interesting social app in itself. It has attracted a loyal user base, especially after a TikTok video went viral.
The startup claims to be creating an app that will allow you to record podcasts with friends. Many people have discovered podcasts in the past few years. Podcasts allow you to subscribe to audio shows and listen to episodes when you need them.
First, people subscribe to podcasts based on their interests. However, if you talk to your friends about podcasts, they will tell you that they like a show especially because of the personality of the hosts.
Listening to a podcast is a content consuming experience that feels like nothing else. You can watch all of the videos posted by a particular YouTuber thinking you know a lot about someone’s personal life by following them on Instagram.
But listening to someone with earphones in their ears for hours is a very intimate experience. When a podcast works, it feels like you’re sitting in a room with a bunch of friends just listening to what they have to say.
Yet your favorite podcast presenters are unlikely to be your friends.
Cappuccino fits here. With the app you can create groups with your friends or your families. Members of the group can record a short audio message – a bean, as Start calls it. They talk about what they think for a few minutes. The next morning, group members will receive a notification that their morning cappuccino has been brewed.
When you click “Play”, chill intro music will be played, followed by audio messages from your friends. It’s not just a series of voice memos – it feels like a relaxing mix of happy, funny, caring, and thoughtful messages from your friends.
While cappuccino is a social app, it focuses on your close friends and family. You’re not trying to get more followers, and you’re not sharing public posts. Everything is inherently private and geared towards groups of real friends.
In many ways, it reminds me of the Snapchat group stories. But Snapchat wasn’t the main inspiration for cappuccino – it was podcasting.
Credit: cappuccino
Prototype early, iterate often
I spoke to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Gilles Poupardin, about the history of the app. Cappuccino is not Poupardin’s first startup. He had worked on Whyd for several years and lived the entire startup experience – collecting startup rounds, opting for the pivot, visiting Y Combinator in San Francisco, separating from his company’s CTO and deciding to close the startup.
Among other things, Whyd worked on a voice-activated connected speaker before Amazon’s Echo range and Google’s Nest speakers really took off. It’s hard to compete with tech giants, even more difficult when you compete in the hardware space.
After that, the Whyd team worked on a service that would allow you to create your own voice assistant. It didn’t really develop as expected either.
In summer 2019 Olivier Desmoulin held out his hand to Poupardin. At that time Desmoulin was on the way to design jumbo, an app that helps you keep track of your online privacy.
“At the time, I didn’t know if I wanted to start a business again – I turned 15 times [with Whyd]”Poupardin told me.
But they discussed podcasts and AirPods – and audio in general – as the next frontier for social apps. The basic premise was simple. Lots of people listened to podcasts, but very few made their own podcasts.
There are three reasons why your neighbor doesn’t have a podcast of their own but does sometimes post things on Instagram and Snapchat:
- Podcasts are long-form content
- It is technically complicated to record and publish a podcast
- You’re trying to attract an audience of people you don’t know.
Cappuccino is about taking a reverse stance on these three points: short content, easy to record, and personal. It’s supposed to be a better experience for both people who record audio and people who listen to audio.
The first version of Cappuccino is not an app, but a side project. “We started a group on WhatsApp, invited 10 to 15 people and asked them to take voice notes and send them all to Olivier,” said Poupardin.
Every evening Olivier Desmoulin tuned GarageBand and created a mix of all the voice memos. In the morning he sent a message to the group chat on WhatsApp and wrote: “Hey, your cappuccino is here.”
Credit: cappuccino
After getting some positive feedback from group members, Pouparding and Desmoulin decided to go forward and create something that felt more like an app. However, they both knew that building a social app is incredibly difficult when it comes to attracting users. They developed something quickly so they wouldn’t waste time developing something that no one would use.
“We hacked the first version of the app within four days – we used it Airtable as a backend service, ”said Poupardin.
Once again, feedback from beta users has been pretty good. They showed the app to some investors and raised $ 1.2 million from Alexia Bonatsos (Dream Machine, also former ProWellTech editor), SV Angel, Kevin Carter (Night Capital), Niv Shrug Capital and Jean de La Rochebrochard (Kima Ventures) . Kevin Kuipers, Willy Braun, Marie Ekeland, Solomon Hykes (Founder of Docker), Pierre Valade (Founder of Sunrise and Jumbo Privacy), Moshe Lifschitz (Basement Fund), Anthony Marnell, Bryan Kim and many others.
Gawen Arab, CTO at Whyd, teamed up with Poupardin again, proving that time is a flat circle. He is now the co-founder and CTO of Cappuccino.
Credit: cappuccino
Let people talk about you
The cappuccino team was not active in relation to press work or advertisements. It was a slow build with some interesting bits.
Last summer, Product Hunt superuser Chris Messina made a post about cappuccino. It was a bit of a surprise as the startup didn’t try to get featured on Product Hunt. Still, the co-founders diligently answered questions from the Product Hunt community.
The next day, Product Hunt newsletter featured cappuccino. It was titled “The Next Big Audio Social Network?” That brought some new users to the app.
Credit: cappuccino
But when Brittany Kay Collier started, things really took off shared a video on TikTok about cappuccino a couple of weeks ago. She sent a direct message to Poupardin on Instagram, telling him it drew a lot of views. The video drew around 3.8 million views and 850,000 likes.
Two days later, Poupardin sent her a job offer to join the team. He secretly hoped she would say yes, and she secretly dreamed of getting a job at a company like Cappuccino.
In the past few weeks, Cappuccino has attracted 225,000 new users. They formed 130,000 groups and broadcast around a million audio stories.
When the team reads public posts about cappuccino on twitterIt feels like the app has found its main user base. The most loyal users seem to be young women in their twenties. You want to keep in touch with your best friends remotely.
You could graduate from college and move to another part of the country. You could be stuck at home because of the current pandemic.
And it seems like new users have no problem hitting the record button and telling stories – after all, everyone is familiar with voice messaging on WhatsApp and iMessage.
“What’s interesting about audio messaging as a medium is that you tell different stories than you would tell by taking a photo for Instagram, sending a snap, or making a video on TikTok,” Poupardin said.
But then what about the elephant in the room? The clubhouse has already reached 8 million downloads. Poupardin listed all the differences in terms of social graphics, audio format, and user base. According to him, there is enough space for several audio apps.
“With video, you have YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok – they’re all different formats. Audio may follow the same trend, ”said Poupardin. Social apps first used the camera in your smartphone because the camera was the Killer hardware function. And audio seems like the next natural step.
He feels like he’s not competing with other audio startups right now. He wants people to wake up and listen to cappuccinos instead of random music on Spotify. “It will help people who are feeling lonely,” he said.