Five minutes into our interview, Anish Acharya stops to ask me a question: How many apps on my phone are for communicating? I start counting a few of the obvious ones on one hand before Acharya tells me he personally has 10.
It sounds like a lot until he starts breaking them down: There are the standalone messaging apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat and Kik, as well as social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google Hangouts, not to mention the basic email and phone call apps.
It's a lot of apps to toggle between for communicating, and Acharya believes he's not the only one dealing with this juggling act. More and more smartphone users, he says, now have to do "all this context switching between apps to participate in conversations, and it's kind of a silly thing."
In the spring of this year, Acharya began working with a small group — most of whom, like him, had worked at Google — to build an application that would serve as an "inbox" for all the conversations a user is having in various messaging apps. The goal, as Acharya describes it, is to reorganize all our conversations around the person rather than the applications the conversation takes place in.
The app, called Snowball, launched Wednesday on Android first because of the openness of the platform, but there are plans to expand to iOS in the next 18-24 months. It currently works with Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Line, among other applications.
Snowball's team also announced raising $2.3 million in funding from First Round Capital, Metamorphic Ventures and Google Ventures.
Acharya had worked as a partner at Google Ventures and more recently an entrepreneur-in-residence at Google. He saw firsthand how many new messaging apps were being pitched to venture capitalists — and how many messaging apps are attracting tens if not hundreds of millions of users.
"It's clear that people want more messaging apps and more variety within messaging," Acharya says, calling this phenomenon "the rise of the many."
The obvious concern for an app like Snowball, which helps to manage this rise of the many, is that some of those many apps may not take so kindly to a third-party tool injecting itself into the messaging experience. However, Acharya argues that just the opposite should be the case.
"The message we are trying to get out there is that we are not competitive with messaging apps. We are actually really symbiotic with them," he says. Snowball offers quick access to the various messaging apps, but the messages are still being sent through WhatsApp and Line and Snapchat rather than Snowball. "We are increasing engagement with those apps."
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