But we had the feeling that it was too complex for most users,” explains Grenke. “ similar to Dubsmash in the sense that it also used User-Generated videos and external sounds. The most recent effort prior to Dubsmash was Starlize, an app that let you create personal music videos. Repeating this situation in different markets confirmed that Dubsmash can be internationally successful.” Let’s Pivot Againĭespite Dubsmash’s seemingly overnight success, it is actually the team’s third attempt at an app since starting the company in mid-2013 after the three founders met at a hackathon in Berlin the previous year.

“A first strong indicator for a ‘hit’ was reaching the number one position in Germany within a week after official release. “Early in our prototyping phase in October, we already got very positive feedback that made us feel that we found something valuable to many people,” Dubsmash co-founder Roland Grenke tells TechCrunch. A success that would soon be replicated in 29 countries, including the UK, France and Holland. However, just seven days after officially launching on November 19th 2014, they’d reached the number one spot in their home country of Germany.

But, after failing to conquer the iOS app store twice before, they couldn’t have known for certain that they had a smash hit on their hands. When Dubsmash founders, Jonas Drüppel, Roland Grenke and Daniel Taschik, created a new mobile app that lets you record a video of yourself, synced to a preselected sound clip, such as a well-known quote from a movie, they had an inkling they were on to something.

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