Start-up Of The Week: Catmoji - A Cool Social Network For Cat Lovers

When we first featured Catmoji on our blog, little did we know that it would soon become the talk of the town (especially, among the cats... they are all meowing at it!)?Jokes apart, there are so many social networking and photo-bookmarking websites on the internet but what makes Catmoji stand out from the rest is the fact that it's?a social network exclusively for cat?lovers.

Developed by two huge cat lovers, Matthew Phiong and Koekoe Loo, Catmoji is a platform for cat lovers where they can share and discover images and videos of cats, and express what they think or feel through emoji.

According to the website, "Catmoji is on a mission to make the internet a better and happier place with cats. Join and help us disrupt the Internet with cats and happiness".

Catmoji is a user-friendly website and is specifically designed for cat lovers. At first, it might look Pinterest-like because of its layout but once you create your profile and get a hang of it, you'll realize the difference.

Catmoji is all about cats, you just have to upload content or re-share already uploaded content by other users. Other users can follow you back, like or re-share your content and comment on it. Based on your activity on Catmoji you can unlock different yet addictive?Catsome badges.

Catmoji is one fab website for cat lovers and owners and in case, you're not a cat person I bet you'll fall in love with cats once you visit Catmoji.?Read on to know more about Catmoji in our exclusive interview with its founder.

1. Hi Matt and Koekoe, please introduce yourselves to our readers.

Hey! We are the founders of Catmoji. Matt is the geeky programmer and Koekoe is the funky designer.

2. What is Catmoji? What inspired you guys to come up with it? Curious about the etymology of your website?s name. Why a website just for cat lovers?

Catmoji is a social network for cats where cat owners and lovers can share and discover cat pictures and videos through emoji.

We had this idea while working on our previous project, Flvrd (Flvrd is a place that lets people share and discover interesting visual content (pictures and videos) based on their tastes). Many of the content shared on Flvrd are cat pictures and videos and that gives us the initial spark. That is how Catmoji was born.

Catmoji is simply the combination of Cat + Emoji.

Well, we found out that there is no one place on the Internet that allows us to easily share and collect cat pictures and videos. Cat owners and lovers share cat pictures and videos all over the Internet from Instagram to Flickr to Youtube and also on social media site like Facebook and Twitter. Plus, the Internet loves cats :)

3. How is Catmoji different from let?s say creating different boards on Pinterest? What differentiates Catmoji from Pinterest? Although a lot of people visually compared us to Pinterest, we build Catmoji specifically for cat lovers from the design to features. For example, every user on Catmoji has a Catvatar associated to their profile.





















4. What inspired you guys to open a Catmoji shop on Society6? Have you considered selling directly through your own website? With the limited resources we have, Society6 is a no-brainer because it does a lot of heavy lifting for us (printing, shipping, payment, etc). In the future, we do want to have our own shop.

5. What are these Catvatars and the Catsome Badges?

Catvatar (Cat avatar) basically is a visual representation of cat breeds or cat lover's alter ego. Catsome Badges are cat-based badges that users can unlock on Catmoji.

6. How are you guys promoting Catmoji? What do you think is the ideal mix of social, online and offline promotion? What about word-of-mouth promotion? Currently, most of the buzz are generated by our users and visitors and yes word-of-mouth through social media. On our side, we use mainly Twitter and Facebook to promote Catmoji. Offline promotion? We never thought of that, maybe in the future.

7. What sort of traction are you guys seeing as far as members is concerned? Could you share the median age of userbase? What is the biggest compliment that you have received for creating the website?

We have just passed 12,000 users last week and the median age is around 30 years old.

Tons of love messages from all around the world from Facebook messages to tweets and emails. Best part is they all came in different languages (Russian, Spanish, Italian and Japanese to name a few) and we had to use Google Translate for that.

8. What is the fondest memory that the two of you have of the process, from conceiving Catmoji to having it up and running ? What issues/difficulties did you face initially?

Going viral. We never expected this to happen and if it doesn't, we might not be having this interview with you.

Initially, Catmoji had a lot of bugs and expectedly so. Also, our servers were pushed to the limit and crashed frequently when Catmoji went viral.

9. What sort of activities do you guys like to pursue in your free time? Which of these do you find to be most de-stressing??

We love to play games on iPad, watch cat pictures and videos, and chill out with cats in our neighborhood. Most de-stressing one? Definitely chilling out with cats.

10. If both of you could have one superhero (or magical) power each, what would it be and why?

Matt: Power that can keep me awake all day long so I don't have to waste time sleeping :)

Koekoe: Being able to converse with dogs as if I'm chatting with real human. It will be fuuuun.

11. What are your future plans for Catmoji? Any new feature(s)/enhancement(s) in the pipeline?

We constantly improving and enhancing Catmoji based on the feedback and suggestions we get from our users. There should be a search feature soon and we are currently working on an iPhone app. Stay tuned!

Thank you Matt and Koekoe for taking out the time and doing this interview with us. We'd like to wish you both and your team at Catmoji the very best for the future.

Well, currently you can only sign-up with Catmoji by requesting for an invite but since the founders of Catmoji are way too kind, they decided to provide our readers a special invite code so that they can easily sign-up using this link -?http://catmoji.com/join/ejunkie/. Keep in mind that this link is only valid for the first 500 readers.

Want us to share your start-up story on our blog, contact us.?

Source: http://www.e-junkie.info/2013/02/start-up-of-week-catmoji-cool-social.html

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