Meet the man behind the lightning fast messaging app Quickie

We are always looking for new ways to message friends, family, and clients faster. As it turns out, all instant messaging is not the same, and some do it more efficiently than others. Quickie is one such app. Created by the developers of Hop, Quickie wants to be your go-to messaging app for snappy conversations that disappear after reading them, much like how real conversation (eww) works. We had a chance to talk to Erez Pilosof about the messaging app and ask him a few questions about the inspiration for Quickie, as well as future plans for the app. Keep reading below!

Examiner: Care to introduce yourself and your role at Quickie?

I'm the founder of Hop, our mission is to rethink how people communicate in every way, shape and form. We currently have two ways we're doing so. The first is Hop email messenger, which we've made to update email to the way that people actually communicate - combining text messaging, instant messaging, emails and organizational tools into one product where the user isn't thinking "oh, I'm emailing." They're thinking simply that they're talking to whoever they're talking to.

Quickie is a lightning-fast way to talk to your friends. Okay, well, it's not 224,000 miles an hour, but it's all about quick, totally ephemeral messages. Whatever you communicate is there for seconds and then gone, like a real conversation on the phone or in person. I'll get to that later.

It sounds crazy to reimagine communication, but we think we're on the road to doing so.

Examiner: What is Quickie, in your own words?

Quickie is an effort to make our messaging feel more natural, simple and expressive. Communicating in real life is simple - you just say what you want to the person you want to. You don't think about whether they'll save your call or chat. You don't think about whether you're using the right methods to do so. You just talk. That's what Quickie is focused on doing.





Today's messaging apps are becoming more and more complex and unnatural (just like email). For example, to send a message on WhatsApp you have to search for the person, open the keyboard, type what you want and hit send. It may not seem like much, but that's four steps. On Zalo Quickie, you select the person and then type, draw, video and send what you want. That's two steps: very simple and fast. Not to mention that because Quickie is ephemeral (you don't have to tell it to be, messages appear and disappear. They're gone. You can't re-view them), you have true privacy and no cluttered "inbox" of conversations.

Examiner: What inspired the creation of Quickie?

I actually built the app so I could communicate with my 6-year-old daughter. She cant use email, SMS or WhatsApp, so I wrote the basic version of Quickie, installed it on my daughters phone and...we just started messaging. I didnt have to explain it. She saw Daddys photo, tapped it, and started sending me sketches and emojis. Lots of them.

Examiner: I can see Quickie being a "fun" app to use for a little while, but what's going to keep users coming back to your app?

Users keeps coming back for the same base reasons. Quickie's fast, simple, expressive and private. When people get used to Quickie, suddenly their current crop of messaging apps feels cumbersome. People write us constantly that (for example) they forget to hit send in whatsapp after using quickie

Also, our recent addition of video messaging is a hit; we built the fastest one-tap video messaging app and people love it.

Examiner: One hot topic in 2015 is obviously security. Once messages are "erased" on the Quickie app, are they stored anywhere else?

Quickie messages are deleted once viewed (or within 24 hours) from the device and the cloud. all messages are highly encrypted while pending delivery.

Examiner: Do you think Quickie fits into the growing wearables market? They seem like the perfect match.

I sure do. I think the Apple watch's new communication tools resemble some of the thinking behind Quickie. We waited for the new SDK from Apple, announced this week, so that we could bring the native experience of Quickie to the Apple Watch and Android.

Examiner: What's Zalo chat your pricing structure with Quickie? How are you guys keeping the lights on?

Luckily, we're highly funded and focused on building this new medium. That said, we have lots of innovative solutions of how to make money from messaging in a non-intrusive ways, but we're keeping them under wraps..

Examiner: Care to talk any about future plans and updates for Quickie?

We have lots great stuff we're playing with I can't share. What I can share is we're working hard on figuring out the right way to bring Quickie to watches in a useful, fun way. It's important to make sure that whatever experience you bring to smartwatches is more than just a gimmick. It has to be something that enhances the experience of someone's life. Too many Apple Watch apps feel like they've launched an app to say "hey, we have an Apple Watch app!" That's the opposite of what I'd want to do, and what we want to do, with anything we create in our lives.

Examiner: That's all the questions I have, is there anything you'd like to close with?

When you try to build something really new and really different it's a long, long journey. We're just getting started.

We'd like to thank Erez for taking the time to answer some of our questions. If you'd like to know more, make sure to check them out for Android and iOS!