mingeelaga8's Profile

Statistics

Badges

Keep contributing to earn more badges!

About

When your Instagram-famous cat is no longer loved – an Oppa Origin story
October 23, 2016
So I have this ridiculously cute Meow Bear named Sashimi, last name Meow. And she's so freakingly adorable that we made her an Instagram account. There's something special about Sashimi – she's broken and thinks she's a dog. We'd go jogging on the beach and she'd follow me around town. Before long, Sashimi Meow had 30,000+ followers and thousands of likes on every photo. And then it all stopped.
The likes stopped coming. And I thought to myself GUR, what is going on? It ain't as if Sashimi Meow got any less cute. She's the Meow Bear, that's impossible. And then I noticed it wasn't just on Instagram… people across the entire social media spectrum were just all around bored, disengaged and no longer posting. You would see headlines like these:
Instagram interaction dropped 40% last year, and other bad news – Venture Beat
Apparently no one's looking for sex on Tinder anymore, says survey - Complex
Is Snapchat losing its cool? – CNN
Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers - Time
Social media fatigue, they called it. And for good reason, as being online remains too impersonal, unsatisfactory, and focused on ego validation. So you segregate your social networks. Close friends & family get Facebook'd. You swipe unsuccessfully on Tinder until your thumb is sore and Tinder wants money. Then you join LinkedIn and find out the horde of thirsty men from Tinder has followed you over to a job site. Nevertheless, you get liked and liked and told you're hot over and over again until, BAM! A dick pic. Raise your hand if this has happened to you.
And don't get me started on Snapchat. I once saw a teen shouting at himself in the mirror in a crowded airport bathroom just to create a Snap. Everyone around him was startled and became concerned about his mental health. If you asked me to point a bright white screen at myself at night and make sexy faces for a flower crown, I'd say thanks but no thanks.
I thought to myself that the alternative – building yet another social network – was a fool's errand. Look what happened to Ello and Peach. You can't go up against the Zuckeberg machine. Momma didn't raise no clown. And no thanks to a dating site as there are way too many of those (I'm talking about you, Farmers Only.com).
I wanted to create a new way where people were engaged in genuine conversations without resorting to lowest common denominator spam, a novel way to reward meaningful social engagement over the long term. So I crashed an Argentinian wedding to round up a kick-ass team and 16 months later, we're launching our Public Beta in Canada today.
I want Oppa to be a search engine for people – an amplified social engagement engine to discover interesting people and interesting content. If you're traveling to New York and love food, you'll find great people ready to talk with you about the best ramen in town. If you're a bit lonely and looking for a cutie nearby, it's done in an effective way where the spam incentive is removed. And if I wanted to ask a dermatologist about that suspicious mole hiding where the sun don't shine – yup, we have them on Oppa too.
Oppa is the world's first Drink Sharing App enabling anyone – not just celebrities – to make money off their social media content. This may just all be an expensive lesson in human nature but it would give me great delight to see two people staring at their phone screen saying something like, “Ermahgerd Becky, just how big is your Piggy Bank?”
So, Hello World – this is our contribution to modern social media. We hope you like our approach. Find me on Oppa @ching and I'll share a drink with you!

Photos