As the summer of 2023 rolled around, I found myself opening up a bunch of tabs in Safari to check if any cool companies I had heard of on the orange site were hiring.
I remember being shocked and excited when I saw that Beeper had a listing. Their app was built on top of an open, secure, and decentralized protocol called Matrix. I had used Matrix through the Element app with some friends, and was aware of some of the cool projects that took advantage of the network. I was also aware that most of the code that deals with Matrix is open-source and written in Go—two qualities shared by Mabel, the terminal app I had just finished working on. Beeper sat at the intersection of a lot of things I was and am still crazy about. I sat down with Eric Migicovsky, the CEO, and came on as a contractor for the summer.
Tenure
Everything I encountered at Beeper was brand new to me. I had never even been paid to code before, and the team was fully remote. Showing up to the all-hands every Monday on Zoom felt pretty surreal. I started out reverse engineering and documenting Snapchat to bring Beeper to the platform, but was quickly moved to work on our hardware venture, affectionately named (after Blackberry threatened legal action) Beepy.
The Beepy was intended to showcase Beeper’s flexibility. What has changed fundamentally about messaging since AIM? Not much. But Beeper, with its foundations on the open Matrix protocol, could take any form imaginable. So to set an example for developers, we brought in the big guns from SQFMI to strap a keyboard and a black-and-white LCD screen together to make something like a modern-day, common-noun beeper!
The software I built for the device came in two parts: a setup utility and a chat client. The former got new Beepy users “from zero to messaging,” taking advantage of users’ main computer to gather their chat history and encryption details before copying all the data to the Beepy. The latter was based on the gomuks terminal app and redesigned for the device’s smaller 1-bit display. Both of these programs were wonderful opportunities to leverage the skills I had just learned building Mabel.
A huge congratulations to the whole team on your new home!
Reflections
I nursed a pet project while I was at the company that I believe has real potential: Beeper Rewind. How many messages did you send this year? What was your daily average? Who was your most frequent contact? What platforms did you use the most? The least? Who is most active in your groupchats? This metadata is super fun to know, as a user, and totally shareable. I would love to clown on the lurkers in my friend group, and be able to quantify how crucial iMessage is to my daily life. Beeper is the only entity in our digital lives that could provide these insights, and generating a little viral image for your Instagram story could be one way to exploit that position. Hesitating on this goes against some of my core principles, and I should have pursued it further.
Speaking of positioning, I don’t think Beeper necessarily optimized its business to be in line with its competitive advantage. We spent a lot of time at the company trying to re-imagine the fundamentals of the messaging experience—it’s probably no surprise that a lot of this involved AI. I think this is all well and good, but ignores the fact that we already had the ability to do something nobody else could, which is to send messages on every platform from one place. I think we should have been focusing on optimizing the mobile app to provide the smoothest messaging experience possible while doing this. Polish, polish, polish. Even beyond this, however, we should have explored the B2B angle. Humane launched their wearable with SMS messaging. How much would their user experience improve if the Pin could talk to your iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal? How much is that functionality worth? I’ll give you a hint: a lot, and we were the only people who could provide it. I don’t think we ever considered this.
Lastly, on a technical note, the concept that underpins Beeper’s ability to send messages across platforms—Matrix’s bridges—is really cool. It is perhaps worth pondering where else it could be applied: bots that observe and replicate behavior across networks, to maximally leverage your efforts. Adversarial interoperability! Vincent Cloutier is doing fun things in this space over on the fediverse. Summarized in a sentence that sounds straight out of Matt Webb’s school of thought: What happens when we ignore the borders between spaces and connect them anyway?
Surprise update a year later
In the summer of 2024, I sat down to talk with a mentor of mine—a successful startup founder, executive, and angle investor of some renown—who presented me with the bluntly phrased perspective that people simply don’t want message aggregation. Rather, he believes, distinct messaging apps are actually a feature: they give you separation of concerns. Having sat on this for a little while longer, it occurs to me that the super-app that aggregates your different messaging platforms may already exist, and it’s your operating system.