The three founders of a small New York City startup were having a great time building a group-messaging app called Fast Society back in 2008, and thought they might have a great product on their hands.

But once they arrived in Austin, TX at the annual SXSW to launch the company about one year later, they decided to ditch it.

Matthew Rosenberg, co-founder and CEO Cameo, is not sure pivot is the right word for the dramatic strategic change his company has made.

The “pivot” has been more of an evolution, he says.

Fast Society began when Rosenberg and some friends were having trouble finding each other at a Bloc Party concert, decided an app could fix the problem.

A few days later, Rosenberg and partners Andy Thompson and Matthew Constantiner started building an app that would give groups users a way to communicate and share experiences over their phones.

Smartphones were still relatively new and the industry seemed full of possibility.

“The first iPhone had just come out, and this was probably before you could install apps,” Rosenberg said.”

By the time they arrived at SXSW to launch the app, they found out that the space was already flooded.

There were about thirty other startups in the space, Rosenberg estimates.  A company had developed a service that made it easy to build the backbone needed for an app, and the barriers to entry hit the floor.

“It was insane,” Rosenberg said.  “I guess when you have a good idea everyone has a good idea.”

Suddenly an idea for a simple useful app turned into something that no longer held their interest.  Tons of startups, including competitors such as GroupMe and Beluga (later acquired by Facebook) were all making the same app.  Even Apple had its own offering, called iMessage.

Even the technology seemed boring.

“Everyone had the same feature set at that point” Rosenberg said.  “No one doing anything innovative.  There was no one doing interesting.”

The team all agreed—the point was apparent enough—that it was time to move on.

They left Texas for New York the next day and got back to work.

“We were working on what we thought would be the third version of Fast Society”, Rosenberg said. “And just kept evolving and evolving into something very different.”

Initially, the team wanted to lay text messages over photos taken on users phones at events to create a kind of text and pictures story.

Then they included video, and found video was much more compelling.  They eliminated photo capability entirely to focus on video.

They realized that they had something completely different from what they had set out to make.  They called it Cameo, “to give it its own chance,” said Rosenberg.

 

Users take video with their phones, and the app renders the video, adds music and forms the clips into a movie.  It does this almost instantly.

Developing the app has taken a lot longer than they had expected.  The technology needed to render video is complicated and the expectations for the app keep growing.

But Rosenberg is happy they left group texting.  There were big expectations for that concept as a business model, but no company in the space has really taken off.

Instead, Rosenberg says, the company has retained the spirit of their original plan.

“Our concept has always been the same, it has been about sharing moments with friends” he said.