The free-form comic strip feature was replaced with a more guided selection of sticker packs, letting users insert themselves into easily meme-able images to send to friends and family. The pivot to Bitmoji came the following year, as the company focused directly on a use case that had always been popular among Bitstrips users: self-representation. If you were on the site in 2013, you can’t have missed the explosion that followed: the company rapidly swelled to more than 10 million users, with 50m strips created over the next six months.

It was popular enough but its real breakthrough came five years later, when it was released as a Facebook app. The app was born in 2007 as a website called Bitstrips, with a rather different goal: letting users without an artistic background easily create short comic strips. Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the room were scratching their head.”īlackstock is the co-founder of Bitmoji, the Snap-owned avatar app, which he describes as “the Kleenex of cartoons … if people see a cartoon representation of someone, even if we had nothing to do with it, they’ll call it a Bitmoji.” “I can remember being in a roomful of investors, in one of these pitch sessions six years ago and telling this roomful of people it was inevitable that everyone on the internet would have an avatar – and we’re going to make them. “We caught on to this a long time ago,” Blackstock says. The only strange thing is how long it took them to catch up. To Jacob “Ba” Blackstock, it’s not surprising that these tech titans have each landed on a similar idea about what’s missing from modern communication. Apple’s executive leadership on World Emoji Day Photograph: Ī couple of weeks earlier, an Android developer had discovered a test feature hidden in the Facebook app that introduced Avatars – cartoonish lookalikes that can be used “to communicate with your friends and express yourself across Facebook”.

Bitmoji app