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Where we started

Chalk began as our response to Jot community members not inviting their friends to the service at, what we thought was, a sufficient rate.

In this way, Chalk was our exploration into incentivizing more sharing. We intended to preserve Jot's core spontaneous group chat interaction while remixing the surrounding mechanics to more clearly demonstrate to people why their experience with the service would be markedly better, the more they brought their existing friends onto it.

Where we ended up

The changes we made were effective at encouraging the kind of growth we sought. Chalk's "1 person, 1 chat room" paradigm appealed to people with existing audiences.



Specifically, teenage Instagram influencers overwhelmed by DM requests from their followers to talk, but who lacked a space to engage with everyone scale.



In subsequent months, this niche of teen influencers helped drive Chalk to grow into a top 100 app in the U.S. App Store (Social Networking) and to support 100,000s of daily interactions.

On Chalk, we thought you should be able move fluidly between media types. It was during our exploration of what would become Chalk's live video feature that we discovered the "live selling" behavior emerging on Persicope and Facebook Live. The behavior that would become the basis for Baskets.