There are times in life when you struggle to express yourself via text. We’ve all been there. Now, thanks to a new app, you don’t have to ponder the right reply to a flirty emoji or the wittiest response to a clever diss—Drake can do the thinking for you. That’s right, kids—Aubrey Graham is ready and able to say what you can’t. Thanks to the Drizzy App.
Luc Succes and Regy Perlera designed the app, which lets you hit your friends with some of Drake’s most infamous bars via text. The app is available through the iTunes App Store, and features categories like “Feels” and “Hate,” so that you know exactly which flavor of Drakespeak you’re getting. Since it debuted a few days ago, Drizzy App has become a sensation. And Succes had no idea that the app would be such an instant, well…success. The initial idea had a pretty simple beginning—Succes and Perlera wanted to improve on what they’d seen.
“After IOS 8 came out, Apple had just announced custom keyboards—a new feature on IOS,” Succes explains. The pair was excited about the feature. “We still had a basic keyboard on Android that lets you inject quotes from hip-hop artists and stuff like that. It wasn’t really well-designed and it didn’t feel that well, and we were like, ‘We could do a much better job than that.’”
Succes and Perlera decided to implement the idea to the new IOS 8, and wanted to feature a specific artist.
“The reason we picked Drake was because we were reading this Genius article about who is the most searched artist for lyrics,” Succes recalls. “And Drake has a lot of different types of songs—the emotional stuff, really turn-up songs—and we were like, ‘Man, his lyrics would be perfect for that kind of thing.’ That’s where it came about. We were like, ‘Let’s just build a keyboard with Drake lyrics and design that!’ We went to a coffeeshop and started marking it out. By the end of the day, I had a working prototype.”
Perlera studied design at the University of Georgia and consults for Amazon while also being active on Dribbble. As for Succes, it was computer science at NYU. He had his own consulting company in college and helped pay for school by designing iPhone apps. He now works at Spotify as an IOS developer. But nothing prepared them for what they’ve experienced over the past week.
“It’s been quite a ride,” says Succes. “We released it last week on Thursday afternoon and actually, we were thinking we’d spend a weekend to try and reach out to our network, tell people in the tech community and tweet it out to some people to try to get people hyped about it. Reggie was off on Friday, so he stayed home and just started tweeting at people, trying to figure out who could be interested in this. He started hitting up editors of hip-hop magazines and stuff like that.
“But on Friday morning, I woke up—we were out the night before for a tech party, I woke up hung over—and my roommate was like, ‘Dude, you’re on DazedDigital!’ I go on my Facebook and that was the first article that came out about Drizzy app. We didn’t do much except for tweeting about it.”
From there, the app has been the talk of the Web. The upstarts decided to go out and celebrate their breakthrough shortly after the story hit Twitter, only to soon learn that their server crashed because of so much traffic. “We ran back home and I was able to fix the bug and get it working again,” Succes says with a chuckle. “It went berserk from there. By Saturday, we were already at 80,000 downloads. By Saturday evening, we were at almost past 100,000, but the App store only tells you how many downloads that morning. We were past 120,000 by Sunday evening. It was crazy.”
And it all came from two guys who just had an idea and believed they could implement it. Within just a week, they’ve more than exceeded their fairly modest expectations.
“He’s a designer, I’m a developer, and we were just like, ‘We can do this,’” says Succes. “I’ve always been into design as well. I’ve designed websites for a lot of people. We’ve started designing some different versions of the app—what would make the most sense. When we designed the first version, we were like just get it out there and build on that.”
So what’s next for these mavericks?
“We have a few plans that we’ve already been putting into motion,” Succes shares. “Ever since we dropped the app, we’ve already released a new set of lyrics—about 30 more lyrics. We did that Saturday evening. We’ve been getting a lot of feedback already. We have about 10,000 feedback emails now. People are really excited about getting more content on the app.”
“The other thing is just adding more artists,” he adds. “We actually have plans to do that right now. We’re still looking at different options, but we definitely want to get more artists on the app and make it easy for people to switch between artists.”
But who could be next? Will there be a 2 Chainz app? Can fans soon be able to communicate solely by speaking the language of Young Thug via text?
“We have some ideas,” Succes says confidently. “But whoever makes the most sense—we’ll see.”
For now, they’re not getting ahead of themselves. This moment is pretty sweet, and while they are already plotting the next move, they’re definitely relishing what they’ve been able to do already.
“It kind of took us by surprise—we weren’t’ expecting this,” says Succes. “It had only been three days and all of these people are asking us for stuff! It feels great. We’re really humbled and so very blessed. There are some apps that have worked for years to get to where we’ve been and we got there in three days, quite literally. We’ve been trending for 48 hours as the most searched app in the app store. It’s kind of amazing that this happened to us—something that every app developer wishes for. We’re just going to keep working hard. And giving the people what they want.”
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