The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2022
Locket bets a home-screen widget can be social: No. 1 App Store, $12.5M
Matt Moss built Locket as a gift for his girlfriend; it hit No. 1 on the App Store, passed 20M downloads and raised $12.5M from Sam Altman and Mike Krieger.
Locket
What the business is
Locket is a free iOS/Android app whose home-screen widget shows live photos from your closest friends and family in real time; invites go through iMessage and the product is built around a small group, not follower counts.
Starting capital：$12.5M in two rounds: $2.5M from friends and close contacts before launch, then a $10M seed in late April 2022 led by Sam Altman, with Mike Krieger, Adam D'Angelo, Sugar Capital and Costanoa Ventures (TechCrunch, Aug 2022).
How it started
Matt Moss, a former WWDC student scholarship winner and UC Santa Barbara grad, built Locket in a week or two as a birthday present for his girlfriend before they went long-distance. They exchanged about five photos a day for six months; friends asked for access, so he released it publicly on the App Store on New Year's Day 2022.
What happened
Locket went viral on TikTok with no paid marketing: Moss's demo video drew roughly 100K views in a couple of days and user remakes reached millions (one topped 5M views in a day). By January 9, 2022 it was No. 1 overall on the US App Store with more than 2M signups, per Apptopia data reported by TechCrunch. By August it passed 20M downloads and 1B photos shared; in December it won an Apple Cultural Impact Award and hit 30M signups, and had raised $12.5M — a $2.5M pre-launch round plus a $10M seed led by Sam Altman with Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Locket is a social app whose entire product surface is the iPhone home screen: a widget that shows live photos from your closest friends and family in real time. Matt Moss, a recent UC Santa Barbara grad and former WWDC student scholarship winner, built it in a week or two as a birthday gift for his girlfriend before a long-distance stretch; the couple exchanged about five photos a day for six months.
Moss's friends asked for access, so he released Locket publicly on New Year's Day 2022. Distribution was free and accidental: a TikTok demo drew roughly 100K views in a couple of days, user remakes topped 5M views in a single day, and by January 9 the app was No. 1 overall on the US App Store with more than 2M signups (Apptopia data reported by TechCrunch).
The product bet was anti-feed intimacy: no likes, no algorithmic feeds, and a hard cap of about 20 people on your home screen. 'I think there is something pretty meaningful to be built in the close friends and family space,' Moss told TechCrunch, arguing that phones had become impersonal.
By August 2022 Locket passed 20M downloads and 1B photos shared; by December it reached 30M signups and won an Apple Cultural Impact Award, with roughly $12.5M raised: a $2.5M friends-and-family round plus a $10M seed led by Sam Altman, with Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo. Moss planned to hire, ship new features and start a subscription model, with no revenue mechanism yet public.
What has to be true
- The wedge was a new surface — the home-screen widget — that turned a private, friend-only photo stream into ambient presence rather than a feed to scroll.
- The hard constraints (no likes, no followers, ~20 people) were the differentiation: an explicit antidote to metric-driven social media.
- TikTok distribution with zero paid marketing let a solo developer's side project become a No. 1 app within nine days.
- The founding story — a gift for a girlfriend — gave the product an authenticity that press and users repeated.
What can be applied
A genuinely new surface can beat feeds: Locket's whole product was a widget, and the constraint — no likes, no feeds, five to twenty people — was the hook. Virality was still unmonetized.
Aftermath
As of December 1, 2022, Locket was still scaling: 30M+ signups, roughly 2B photos sent, an Apple Cultural Impact Award, a 10-employee team and $12.5M in funding that Moss said would go to hiring and new features. The company was in the early days of a subscription model with no revenue mechanism yet public; its bet was that the close-friends-and-family space could outlast the viral wave that created it.
Sources
- Locket, an app for sharing photos to friends' homescreens, hits the top of the App Store
- Locket, the popular app that lets you post photos to your loved ones' homescreens, raises $12.5M
- This Founder Created A Photo-Sharing App For His Girlfriend, Went Viral on TikTok, and Raised $12.5 Million in Capital
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