The “My Freebie List” Story
So, a couple of years back my cousin approached me with a pretty stupid idea for an iPhone app. He called it “The List”, and it was inspired by the Friends episode The One With Frank Jr., where the gang all talk about their “Freebie Five” lists — famous people they can sleep with without their partner getting upset.
Chandler: Well, we have a deal where we each get to pick five different celebrities that we can sleep with, and the other one can’t get mad.
Ross: Ah, the heart of every healthy relationship: Honesty, respect, and sex with celebrities.
Monica: So, Chandler… who’s on your list?
Chandler: Uh, Kim Basinger, Cindy Crawford, Halle Berry, Yasmine Bleeth, and, ah, Jessica Rabbit.
Rachel: Now, you do realize that she’s a cartoon… and way out of your league?
Chandler: I know, I know, I just always wondered if I could get her eyes to pop out of her head.
Hilarious, right? I toyed around with it, eventually getting pretty far along. Jeremy acquired the domain name myfreebielist.com and we had someone make up an icon for us.
And then? Well, not much. We got distracted by other projects (The Dossier and Shifthub, for example). We set The List aside for 18 months or so.
Ross: Okay, I’m done with my choices. These are final.
Rachel: Well, it’s about time.
Joey: Oo, very official.
Ross: Oh, yeah, well, ya know, Chandler printed it up on his computer.
Monica: And who laminated it?
Ross: That was me.
A few weeks ago, Jeremy and I were talking about it and thought “fuck it, let’s just do this!” By now the existing app was way out of date in its look and feel, so I started fresh and threw together something with an emphasis on being fun to play with. I mean, it’s a pretty simple concept, something that you could use the Notes app for, so I wanted it to have some fun going on.
There were some false design starts. Notably, the original design was very much a “list”, displaying your entire ranked 5. You could tap on someone, view their photo, and search for new people to add. At the celebrity view page, I added a cool, Path-inspired popup menu that would allow you to select what spot the celebrity had in your list. While this was functional, it wasn’t much fun. There was no real delight in using the app (barring the “tee hee hee” of picking out the celebrities for your list) with the exception of the spot-selector.
Jeremy wisely advised me to reconsider the layout. “The button is so fun to tap and watch open and close, it should be front and centre!” I was pretty skeptical. I mean, this wasn’t about viewing one person — part of the fun was going to be pulling out your phone and showing off your entire list. I was at a bit of an impasse.
Monica: Rach? Are you really gonna let him do this?
Rachel: Honey, he’s about to go hit on Isabella Rossillini. I’m just sorry we don’t got popcorn.
I spent some time playing with a bunch of apps — Path, Instagram, Facebook, Twittelator Neue and others, trying to get some sense of what made them fun. Path had a great technique that was a blast: swiping the side views. Facebook has a similar (though less fun!) method of doing more or less the same thing. So: what if the list was always available with a swipe one way, you could select slots on the list there or using the button on the now-main celebrity view, and swipe the other way to search.
Man, you can’t even imagine how much fun Jeremy and I had playing with that version. The giggles we had were hilarious, and the people we showed it to really loved it. I added thumbnail images of the face (using the very cool face recognition APIs provided by iOS5!) I threw together a quick email-your-list button and we were ready to submit to the app store. But that’s not what really happened, not at all.
Ross: And… Isabella Rossillini.
Chandler: Oho! Very hot, very sexy. But, uh, ya know, she’s too international, ya know. She’s never gonna be around.
Rachel: So?
Chandler: So, you gotta play the odds: Pick somebody who’s gonna be in the country, like, all the time.
Rachel: Yeah, ‘cause that’s why you won’t get Isabella Rossillini—geography.
During my time playing with other apps trying to figure out what made them fun, I realized something about Instragram (one of my favourite apps of all time!): viewing the photos online and sharing them on Twitter and Facebook is a huge amount of the fun. You get to take quirky photos, make them sexy and post them for whoever you want to see them.
Doing that required a website. So, I whipped up a Rails 3.2 site that would receive and deliver the celebrities. I got it interacting with the app and suddenly we had something that was way more enjoyable than either of us had expected. And, because it was on a website we could create leaderboards and statistics for each celebrity.
When we started showing this to some early adopters, we got some great feedback. Everyone universally thought the app was both terribly dumb and terribly fun. Some of the quotes we got were priceless:
- “There is very little way in which this isn’t the best way to spend some time.”
- “Man this is tough, but if I have to wade through hundreds of pictures of beautiful women to pick a top 5, I’ll suffer through!”
- “Trying to make decisions like… does Emma Stone or Ashley Greene make the top 5? These are questions no man should have to grapple with!”
- “Man, 5 is too much pressure.”
The thing that was evident was that everyone was having fun. People were talking about who was on everyone else’s list. It was a great social moment, people pulling out their phones and comparing notes. That’s when we knew we were ready to submit to the app store.
I’m really excited to announce that
My Freebie List is available today for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the App Store. It’s 99 cents, so that we don’t need to figure out a way to monetize it in some creative and ultimately privacy-invady way. For a buck, you can’t beat the fun you’ll have with your friends. :-)
1 Notes