Discovering the world with Corner | S³ Season 1 Finale!

Season 1 of S³ is DONE! And there’s a shirt to go with it 😎

10 weeks ago Saturday Startup Stories was just an idea, today it becomes a double digit show with our tenth episode wrapping up season 1! We thought we’d celebrate this season with a custom shirt that gives a visual nod to the themes, technologies, and ideas we covered the past 10 weeks.

The shirt will only be available to purchase until 10/1 at 12am PST, then we’ll never make it again, early fans only! Here’s the link to buy one, we’ll send them to production the day orders close and ship them to you as soon as they’re ready.

I was already a fan of Corner before I started S³ 10 weeks ago. I was struck by Eliza and Jake’s vision of making the world a smaller place through an app that “digitizes word of mouth,” and is designed so dang beautifully by what was originally just a team of 2.

Corner just hit the app store 2 weeks ago, before that they were in a private beta for over a year. They were focused on “perfecting the little interactions that other competitors miss,” Eliza explained in the episode.

In today’s startup world there’s a mindset of ship fast and iterate. Quality of product? Don’t worry about it, focus on finding PMF and iterating. That’s not the approach Eliza and Jake decided to take. They put quality first, yet kept a breakneck speed and shipped 5 iOS builds a week for over a year.

“We debated a lot, do we take the few extra months to perfect those little interactions? We did and I don’t regret it. It makes us who we are,” Eliza explained in the episode.

Before founding taking on lots of credit card debt and liquidating her 401k to found Corner, Eliza worked in finance. Before that, she had her first job at age 13 at her mom’s Chinese restaurant and her dad’s acupuncture clinic. She grew up in the world of small businesses and as a result have always meant something extra special to her.

During the pandemic both her and Jake, separately, were thinking a lot about small businesses and how they’d survive in the turbulent times of COVID-19 lockdowns.

Jake was building a QR scanning app for restaurant menus, something still popular today, and Eliza was trying to learn how small businesses she knew of were looking to survive the pandemic lockdowns.

She relearned that small businesses thrive as a result of community and word of mouth recommendation. Shortly after these conversations she set out to build an early mockup of Corner to help digitize word of mouth. She tweeted about the project, looking for help and that’s where she met Jake.

Talking to Eliza in our prewriting call was really exciting. How do you design an app that tons of people are interested in and want to create content on?

When thinking of growing popularity of consumer products via marketing and growth, many people turn to influencers. Jake and Eliza realized quickly that influencers, especially in the world of location recommendation, tend to be financially motivated rather than interested in discovering unique and interesting spots people would love.

As a result of this, they decided to focus on “curators” rather than influencers, people who have taste and their ear to the ground with an understanding of what’s exciting, up and coming, and worthwhile to share.

Their current growth goal is to get 100,000 curators on Corner. They believe if they can do that the tailwind will bring Corner to its next stage of growth and allow people to discover meaningful places, communities, and connection like never before.

Corner is truly a wonderful experience. It’s amazing that Corner is as performant, smooth, and exciting as the products of multi-billion dollar social media companies. I feel lucky to have discovered it so early on.

A big thank you to Jake and Eliza for agreeing to do this, I can’t wait to watch as Corner blows up and becomes the world’s next big social media craze — it’s not a possibility in my mind, but an eventuality. Also thank you to your cats for agreeing to be filmed, Catherine and Momo were phenomenal.

Thank you all for watching, reading, and supporting the first of many seasons of S³. I think we’re building something really special together.

Keep on building the future,

— Jason