When Instagram opens Story links to everyone, rebuild an old viral idea on it

HostThat's awesome. Can you just walk through the journey of NGL a little bit, for people who don't know yet?

Hunter IsaacsonYeah, for sure. We started the company right when Instagram released the link feature for everybody. It used to be that you could only post links if you had 10,000 followers, so, you know, only people that were influencers, basically, could ever shill anything on their story. So, they change this at the end of October of 2021, and that's literally right when we started building the app. Like, the second that we saw this, myself and a few friends of mine,

Hunter Isaacsonwe got on a Zoom call on Halloween and we're like, "We need to build a product for this. What's the most viral thing we can think of?" And we're like, "Let's build an anonymous messaging platform on top of Instagram." The consumer world is so small, we thought everyone was going to do this. We thought this was going to be like the number one thing people were going to build. So, our focus was like, how do we build this in like as fast as possible? We built the app in about a month,

Hunter Isaacsonbut then it was like six months of nobody using it. So, it was like our assumption that everybody saw the opportunity was like so wrong. No one cloned us until after we went viral. That six months was very hard. We tried a lot of different things. You know, we rebranded the app first, just design-wise, then I changed the name. I came up with the name NGL. We got a sick domain, ngl.link.

Host… new invention. Like, there's anonymous messaging app came before this, but did not take advantage of this exact platform shift that you talked about, which is the link in Instagram Story. I'm curious if is this the way that you think of products in general? Like, tying a an existing concept with a new platform arbitrage, is that like a way to always think about startups? Or are there other frameworks that you think about starting products?

Hunter IsaacsonThat's definitely a good framework, I would say. Like, find existing things that have happened on other networks or other distribution mechanisms, and just switch the distribution mechanism, and improve the product to a certain degree. And and you're right, you know, before NGL there was YOLO, Yik Yak, ask.fm. We could go all the way back, I mean, Formspring, like this is a a behavior on the internet that's existed for a long time. I do think that the reason NGL went as big as it did

Hunter Isaacsonand has more downloads than all of those apps is because we use the biggest distribution graph of all, which is the Instagram graph. That's why it did so well. But NGL also is huge on other platforms, too. Twitter, it's big on WhatsApp, like it's big across the board, I think, also, because a lot of these anonymous apps kind of overcomplicated them after they were successful, right? They added feeds, and they added complicated profile tools, and like, if you look at NGL today,

Hunter Isaacsonand you look at NGL when it went viral, it's very, very similar. It's not changed to a a large order of magnitude. I'd say that it's more been optimized and refined, and that we found ways to just like make the product cooler and more fun and more engaging, but we didn't, you know, add multiple more tabs, and you know, make it super confusing. Like, it stayed relatively the same.