SPUN: The Tale of a Successful Brooklyn App
September 2009: The Electric Literature iPhone app (the first of its kind) is chosen by Apple as an employee pick, and thousands are sold for $4.99/each.
October 2009: Electric Literature publishes the first short story composed for and published on Twitter, Rick Moody’s “Some Contemporary Characters.” The story involves a middle-aged man, a young woman, OkCupid and a train ride to Coney Island. The New York Times writes about it. @electriclit will gain 150,000 Twitter followers.
December 2009: Electric Literature turns a profit. Andy and Scott realize it won’t be long before mobile phones and tablets become the most popular way to consume content. They begin considering how the new medium will change the way content is created, discovered, and consumed.
January 2010: Audible.com invites EL to New Jersey to discuss ways to expose young readers to audio books. Inspired by oral histories, folklore and the film Wings of Desire, Andy and Scott propose mapping humanity’s collective consciousness by creating an audio layer over the entire world that anyone can access or contribute to via a mobile app. “That’s not what we were expecting,” say the Audible executives, “but we’ll think about it.”
March 2010: Audible says “No.” Scott and Andy decide to build it anyway.
May 2010: Electric Literature’s success helps Scott and Andy secure funding to build Broadcastr, the location-based audio app.
June 2010: It would have been smart to get some advice from people who had done this sort of thing before, but Andy and Scott are of the DIY ethos and dive right in to seven months of development with the help of some friends and a group of Bulgarian programmers. “It’s like we’re building a rocket ship in our garage,” says Scott. And it was like that: Two people who had no background in aerospace engineering secretly and eagerly building an extremely complicated machine they expect to take them to the moon.
January 2011: Broadcastr launches a public beta with a website, iPhone and Android app. It’s buggy, slow and the design isn’t brilliant—but it works, and the high concept excites people. Andy and Scott present Broadcastr at the Paley Center’s “Next Big Thing” and win the audience vote. Someone from the Oxygen Network is there and decides to use Broadcastr in the social media campaign for Paris Hilton’s comeback reality show. Scott hangs out with Paris. Andy says, “We’ve entered the unreality vortex.”