In the age of apps, celebrities are living in your phone. Kim Kardashian alone has a mobile game, a subscription lifestyle app and her own set of emoji. But not every YouTuber, athlete or actor has the time and talent to build an app from scratch.
Chicago’s Sapphire Apps helps influencers build their brands with customized apps. So far, the company has focused on creating emoji apps for clients like Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman and DJ Deorro’s record label Pandafunk.
“They start out with the emoji app, but our intention is to add additional features to sustain and increase our clients,” said co-founder Thomas Ma (above left). “We're getting them their own mobile brand.”
The idea is to build a template that can easily be customized for any client’s needs, helping them market new product or drive revenue from their fame.
For example, a musician could offer a set of free emoji to encourage a user to download their app, then offer a subscription service to give users behind-the-scenes access to recording sessions or tour life.
Sapphire Apps’ target clients are celebrities who have built their following on mobile platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, but the startup wants to offer them more control over their content than third-party social networks.
“Most of their following is mobile, and what we're offering is mobile,” Ma said. “So it's very easy for their followers to engage in our products as opposed to influencers selling something like perfume [as a sponsored post on a social network].”
The team behind the app includes Ma and his co-founder, Anish Dalal (above right). Dalal had previously worked on creating apps that showed up in high-traffic app store searches. He was so successful with his app store optimization tricks — building more than 500 apps that brought in millions of users — that he left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with just a semester to go.
Ma also has a history of entrepreneurship. While still in school at the University of Illinois at Chicago (he graduated last year), Ma worked on a job hunting platform for grads. While developing that project, he said he honed the outreach skills that got him in contact with celebrity clients.
Using Dalal’s app store success, the startup said it has already landed nearly a half-dozen paying celebrities. The duo works with contractors to create emoji and do supplemental development work. Sapphire Apps splits app store revenues with clients, with exact percentages determined on a per-client bases.
So far, the startup has bootstrapped development and plans to keep things lean while building out a client base. In the coming year, it hopes to add live streaming, social networking, merchandising and gaming options for its clients.
Image via Sapphire Apps
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