iMoji

Daniel Gruselowski and Jason Stein, along with four other co-founders, met through mutual friends and realized a clear problem in digital communication. "Text messaging is very dry. You can be really misunderstood in a simple text," Daniel explained. As messaging became central to daily life, they felt confined by the limited, static emoji options available. The emoji space was "blowing up," and they saw an opportunity to create something bigger.

When iMoji first launched about two years prior to this interview (around 2013-2014), they started as a creation tool. The response was immediate and overwhelming—they got "a ton of early adopters and a lot of great press and a lot of people creating custom stickers." They knew they had struck a nerve. However, rather than doubling down on that single model, they tested multiple approaches to figure out the best way to deliver emoji to users at scale.

After experimenting with several product iterations, they landed on an SDK and API approach—embedding their sticker library into third-party apps. This became their core distribution model. They began partnering with messaging apps and keyboards, from small products with no users to massive platforms with 100 million+ downloads. By December 2015, they had "almost 50 partners" integrated, including Facebook Messenger, text-free keyboards like Flexi and Edge, and their own native keyboard. Their seven-person team focused obsessively on impressions rather than user counts.

The partnership model proved most effective. They demonstrated the power of real-time trending by tracking organic search patterns and surface relevant content to users instantly. When the "left shark" moment went viral during the Super Bowl halftime show, their system automatically curated relevant stickers as users searched for it—something "no other platform in the world that does stickers can get as trending and relevant content out to users as fast as that." They also tracked major cultural moments like Robin Williams' passing and DJ Khaled's Snapchat rise, letting their content team curate and feature appropriate stickers across partner apps.

By December 2015, iMoji was generating over 1 billion impressions per month—their key metric for measuring success. They had raised $2 million in equity seed funding in July 2014 and were entirely focused on growing distribution and impression volume. Their long-term vision: become "the biggest, most prolific and most ubiquitous sticker source on the internet"—essentially the YouTube of stickers. Once they reached billions of impressions monthly, they planned to unlock native advertising as their monetization strategy, carefully matching brands with relevant content to preserve user experience.