Stryke: an app to create and share one-tap funny video stories from everyday life

Early in Jan 2014, Rajesh Setty gave us a hat tip about a fun app called Stryke that Ramachandra Acharya from GlobalDelight was working on. I wrote a story about Stryke, a new app that lets friends troll each other through funny videos. Before I hit publish I received an email from the founder stating they wanted to postpone the launch and do a bit of product iteration. Eight months later, Stryke is ready.

What is Stryke

The new Stryke is an app that lets users record split-second videos with just one tap and add witty text and music to create hilarious stories.

What you see around you is a form of content, the way Instagram helps you turn a food in front of you as content and share it on social media. Stryke allows you to turn what you see around you as a six second looping video content for fun.

Once users log in using their Facebook credential, Stryke enables them to share their funny videos privately with their friends circle. They can also have an entertaining chat using talking emoticons and text. To enhance its chance with network effect the app also lets users share the looping video publicly with other Stryke users or via iMessage, Whatsapp, and Twitter.

Acharya, the Founders of Stryke, says, “When people get together at a party, a family function, at school or at their workplace, they love to share a laugh about quirks of friends, family fun, about their pets, workplace stories, classroom jokes, political trolls and so on. Everyone loves humor and humor drives group conversation. Stryke provides an easy (one-tap) means to create fun stories which people can share instantly and have an amusing conversation.”

Stryke Stories

It has a one-to-one and group chat capabilities built in the app. All the looping videos the users create or those they receive from friends are clubbed at one place called Stryke Stories. This hub enables users to reuse them as many number of times as they want to keep the fun going.

To add that extra zing of mischief within the group, you may choose to hide by donning the 'anonymous' avatar and play tricks with your pals; keep your friends guessing all along! Regarding users’ safety and anonymity, Ram Acharya says, “Anonymity is allowed only within private groups. Groups members can block an abusing member or a user can leave a group if he/she does not like the conversation.”

Ram Acharya told YourStory that the single biggest problem they faced while developing Stryke was “providing the simplest possible means to create instantly sharable fun stories through videos. Yes, we did pass that obstacle.” He added, “So we came up with one-tap videos. Users can now point the camera at their friends in action or their pets playing and just tap, a funny video is created instantly, add a witty caption, music and a funny story is ready to share. This has doubled the creation of Stryke videos.” So far 100,000 Stryke videos have been created.

At present, Stryke does not sell stickers, but in the future they have plans to offer more creative/animated stickers.

Stryke has a split-second-video-looping technology, which is patent applied and pending. The app captures a split-second video to keep the file size minimum and uses a unique looping logic to make it look hilarious. This split second video technology lets users share videos almost instantly just as easy as photos. Ram Acharya says, “Split second video looping technology is about capturing an action as a shortest possible video clip and looping the clip into a six sec video in such a way that it looks real funny. The technology also allows users to share a six second video almost instantly like a photo. This technology is patent applied and pending.”

Pivoting from trolling to fun video sharing

Initially the app’s premise was based on “When group of friends catch up, the atmosphere is crackling with lively banter & humor. But what is friendship without some harmless teasing, some leg pulling & cracking jokes on your best buddies?” So they developed a tool for friend to troll friends. But they didn’t get much adoption. Ram says, “We started the app for people to create funny videos of their friends, troll them in private groups and have fun. Even though teens had accepted the concept readily, we gradually saw our app getting used more for sharing fun videos with their friends and less to troll their own friends.”

They are now ready with version 1.0, titled ‘Stryke - Tap the fun’ for its worldwide launch.

As parents are crowding facebook, youngsters are in constant search for their solace in other social platforms. From SnapChat to twitter’s vine to Facebook Slingshot to TapTalk and the recent Instagram’s Hyperlapse, all are trying to innovate fun way to use cameras on smartphone. Stryke just joined the list.

What do you think of Stryke, the latest addition to the list of sea of camera centric apps? 

For more on Stryke you can read: http://www.stryk.es/stryke-users-video.html