00:10:40 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:10:40] S1: Yeah, absolutely. That was literally exactly my childhood. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't enrolled in any sports or athletic activities. So that was my day. It was like, play my online games. Minecraft entered the picture at some point to play that. It was like this really amazing, like hunger games Minecraft server. That was really fun. And then when I felt inspiration or when I felt like I wanted to just go build stuff too. It was all kind of blended together. [00:11:09] S0: Did your online friends ever become your physical real friends? I mean, you ever meet folks that you ended up building, like, a real relationship with in grade school, or was it always, like, people through the internet that you never get a chance to meet? [00:11:22] S1: I know some people in Skype. I don't know if you remember Skype back in the day. Had Skyped some people. I met more of them in middle school. In middle school, I kind of realized that I could strong-arm my way to going to different conventions and things in the real world and start to meet some people. But that's like another sub story, but I was very deep in the Tumblr fandom era and community. And a lot of those people would meet up for, like, premieres or conventions and stuff like that.
00:11:22 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:11:22] S1: I know some people in Skype. I don't know if you remember Skype back in the day. Had Skyped some people. I met more of them in middle school. In middle school, I kind of realized that I could strong-arm my way to going to different conventions and things in the real world and start to meet some people. But that's like another sub story, but I was very deep in the Tumblr fandom era and community. And a lot of those people would meet up for, like, premieres or conventions and stuff like that. [00:11:52] S0: So Well, I definitely wanna get to that. And I think that you described kind of like, hey. You were really into the web in grade school. But then I think you happened to be in school when the iPhone and mobile became a thing. And I'm curious as to, like, how did you react to all the sort of hysteria? I was in industry at the time and it clearly was a huge thing for all of us, kind of like AI is today. But that, like, wave of the phone probably happened when you were in school. So curious, was that a moment or was this something that you were late to the game on?
00:12:28 · Markie Wagner
[00:12:28] S1: It was a moment that I was the only person in the entire world that cared about it. I had gotten my first iPhone and kind of like begged my family for the first iPhone. I actually ended up getting the three g when it came out and when the App Store came out. And for me, you know, I was like, oh, I'll need it whenever I walk home from school to make sure I can text or something. I made up some excuse of why it had to be that iPhone. But I remember I got it and I was like, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my life. And the app store had just been kind of accompanying as the three gs came out, the app store came online and I had no job. Like school is just not that overwhelming at that age. And so I would spend all day, My fascination with desktop computers switched to mobile, basically. And I'd spend all day playing all the early apps on the App Store, which of course were so buggy, Tapzoo. All of the early primitives of what became the farm bills and things like that were kind of happening on the app store. I'm like, and I would just spend all my time on it. I remember I would like get iTunes gift cards and then spend it on the in app purchases. And I was like, this is the best use of money I've ever seen. And so I was just doing that all day. And I think there's actually a really funny story. I want to say it was third grade or fourth grade or something. Might be the wrong time period, but everyone in my class had to write or make some kind of art project about the thing that they love the most in the entire world. For most people, that was like their pet, ballet, their family, the ocean. But for me, that was the iPhone. And so I have this scrapbook in my childhood home that's like 45 pages of like really detailed feature reviews of of what Voice Memos did. I'm like, this is what iTunes looks like. Just going into such detail about it. And I remember I presented it. Everyone's like, what is this? Why is this what you love the most in the world? And I was like, it's what I love the most in the world. So I have that very, very explicit memory. But it was just like magic.
00:14:25 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:14:25] S0: What's funny is that if we go to the fifth grade version of that today, 90% of kids are gonna describe the iPhone as their most loved possession. [00:14:35] S1: Yeah. An early adopter, an early adopter, no kids had phones back then. I was the only person that I knew with a phone. So it's not like I was texting my friends. I remember I like, when are you guys gonna get phones so I can text you on my home landline? Or they'd be dialing me, and I'd pick up on my little mobile phone. And we'd all use, like, Yahoo and AOL Messenger or, like, iChat to talk back in the day. But there was nothing to do but use apps because there was nothing for me to talk to on my phone at the time. [00:15:02] S0: Right. So it's like kind of a single player device at the time. Today, think of phones as ubiquitous, right? Everyone's got a smartphone, everyone uses the web on the phone, everyone has is connected on WhatsApp and iMessage and and all that. But you're right. And there wasn't a social apps in the same way they are today either. [00:15:19] S1: No. Yeah. I didn't have early Instagram in middle school. I remember I had a bunch of fan accounts and stuff that like meme accounts and fan accounts that I would have on Instagram. But people in my middle school had started using it, but more on iPod touches and things like that too.
00:15:19 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:15:19] S1: No. Yeah. I didn't have early Instagram in middle school. I remember I had a bunch of fan accounts and stuff that like meme accounts and fan accounts that I would have on Instagram. But people in my middle school had started using it, but more on iPod touches and things like that too. [00:15:33] S0: Right. Right. And, obviously, the price points were relatively high comparatively. Did you end up taking your obsession with programming and your kinda hamster success, this sort of big kind of top trending hamster to website? Did you end up making that on the phone, or did the phone and programming ever kinda collide?
00:15:54 · Markie Wagner
[00:15:54] S1: For me, I don't know if the Hamster website was by any means top trending, although it is extremely entertaining. For me, that moment kind of came in middle school. I think it was seventh grade. I was a big enjoyer of charades, bit of a theater kid at the time. And there was no charades game on the app store that I thought was really great. So I ended up going into my rabbit hole into my childhood bedroom, closing the door for a week and building one of the first charades game on the app store back in middle school. I don't know what year that would be now. I think seventh grade. Yeah, I was very happily built. Most of the screens were all built in Photoshop and kind of Frankenstein together. I was looking at different online guides to app development. And I had finally built this fairly functional, but unquestionably built app. I got it out the door. And I put on the app store, posted it all around the different internet forums, and it kind of blew up much more so than anything that I had built before. And got tens of thousands of users pretty quickly actively using it. And I was getting emails and reviews from people using it in countries that I had never even heard of at that point, right? They'd say, I'm playing this with my family over Christmas. And I play this in line at Disneyland. And can you add this feature? And it was just so crazy to me as these emails would come in. And I love people. I love talking to people. And these people would ask me for things, tell me what they liked about it. And I'm just in my childhood bedroom, just typing away at my computer, very excited about it. It was this very discontinuous moment for me where I realized that in a very short amount of time, could make something that was widely used and made people happy and was something that people wanted to use. Even though I was young, it didn't matter because I could build what people wanted. And so that was a very important moment in my life and kind of a realization that I was never really able to unseat.