iCap That App Exit

A story about how Cody Ko created a viral caption-generating app while in college that became #1 in the App Store.

"I was a senior in college on the diving team. I never did internships, had no resume, and needed a job to stay in the US since I'm Canadian. I was studying computer science and wanted to learn how to make an app, so I bought a book and taught myself iOS development.

I created this app called iCap That where you'd select a picture and it would automatically apply funny captions from an internal database we created while drunk. The captions were general enough that people thought there was AI involved. Like you'd take a picture of someone and it'd say 'addicted to cocaine' and people would be like 'hey that's so true!'

The app kept getting rejected by Apple's review board for being inappropriate. So I wrote code that timed the internal database - after 7 days it would release all the dirty captions. This got past Apple's review process since they only review for about a week.

It blew up and became the #1 app in the App Store, above eBay and Google. I had no idea how to monetize it. Then I got an email from a CEO of a startup in Palo Alto who wanted to hire me and buy the app. They acquired it for $50k - half cash, half stock. My first job was to make iCap That+, the paid version, which immediately made $200 and I was like 'damn it, should've just done this myself.'

We ended up making iCap That 2 and iCap That 2+ and milked it until it died. The whole thing probably made about half a million dollars."