What the business is
A free iOS app where users design and publish interactive multimedia pages called Verses, with an AI assistant guiding them from design to publishing.
The bet
That Gen Z wants a scrollable, multimedia canvas with an AI assistant for expressive mini websites, not template-based tools like Canva or Wix.
How it started
Bobby Pinckney, a former PwC management consultant, and Michelle Yin, a former Meta engineer, met in college and founded the YC-backed music discovery app Discz. They added a Profile feature where users drag songs or images, expecting self-expression about music taste, and were surprised that users employed it as a creative tool.
What happened
That led them to build Verse, which launched to the public on iOS in June 2024. Users make mini websites for moodboards, invitations, storefronts, fan pages and link-in-bio pages on a scrollable canvas. The AI assistant uses LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta's Llama and Mistral. British singer Kenya Grace and the hard seltzer brand Lunar used it. The app is free, with a subscription possible later, and Android and web versions are planned.
What has to be true
Discz users showed the founders that a profile page could be a creative medium, not just a music-taste display.
Pinckney argues not everyone wants to be on camera and make a TikTok, leaving room for other ways to express oneself.
AI assistance lowers the skill needed to design and publish from a phone, in Yin's words.
What can be applied
Watching what users do with a side feature, here a profile page used as a design tool, can reveal a bigger product than the original app.
Aftermath
As of 2024-09-11 Verse was live on iOS and free, with 200,000+ Verses created and Android and web versions planned; no revenue or user count for Verse itself was given.
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