FOUNDERS OF MESSO: Cécile Correa and Kevin Waller.

Expatriate French woman Cécile Correa and her English husband Kevin Waller’s app
Messo is based on 10-second-long audio comments premised in the idea of ‘humanising
social media’. Anand Holla gleans the finer points of a meaningful interaction

In a time when every waking moment of social networking fiends is spent under the seductive sceptre of blinking notifications and exploding timelines, it’s rather hard to step out of the endless tangle of virtual chaos and wonder if some piece is still missing in the social media experience.
Sometime in the summer of 2013, French expat Cécile Correa did just that as she yielded to the first pull of that curiosity. “We look at the pictures of our friends and family on social media and read the comments. When we want to express our feelings, we make an exclamation mark or two. I thought it would be nice to see the picture and hear them out; hear the love, the excitement, the joy,” Correa says, sitting in a restaurant at Al Muntazah with her husband Kevin Waller and tending to their adorable seven-month-old baby boy Thibault.
That fleeting thought would give wings to Messo, a brand new, free photo sharing app that allows only audio communication — it was released on iOS, earlier this month. Waller, a UK expat and the Managing Director of I Love Qatar, explains why the idea, straight off the bat, seemed right.
“As an expat, when you are on social media, you feel a lot like you are tracking your family back home,” Waller muses, “You don’t really feel involved in what they are doing. The platform where you do feel really involved is Skype. But it takes so much planning to organise a Skype conversation.”
Messo, which carries a tagline of “humanising social media”, therefore, is like the halfway point, the couple feels. Marked by a neat design and simplified interface, the app works much like Instagram as you can put pictures through filters, post them publicly or privately to your friends, family or followers, browse through others’ pictures and like and comment — but only as 10-second-long audio comments.
“So you can hear the excitement in their voice and the ambience in the background, but you can also put your thought out when you are ready and wait for it to come back,” Waller says.
It’s not like the founders had a momentous brainwave that they latched on to. In fact, the idea periodically flashed, darting in and out of their consciousness over weeks. While this happens to most, Correa and Waller did what few do — they acted on it.
“It was one of these ideas that once occurred to Cécile and life continued. But then, it kept coming back,” Waller says. Correa agrees. “We kept returning to social media and we kept thinking this could work,” she says.
What facilitated the couple’s access to investors and developers was their participation in the Arab Mobile App Challenge (AMAC) competition. In October 2013, Correa and Waller pitched their app ideas — Waller’s was a fun gaming app called Rubber Duck Racing, Correa’s was Messo. “They loved both the ideas. So we led two separate teams,” Waller says.
During that year’s Christmas, Waller and Correa were in Sri Lanka to attend their friends’ wedding. “They were entrepreneurs, and there were probably eight entrepreneurs around the table. We told them about Messo. They all said it’s a game-changer,” Waller recalls.
In January 2014, back now at the competition, the founders, given their background in Sales, belted out cool presentations. “All the judges spoke of Messo as an app that stands out,” Correa says.
However, Messo couldn’t make it to the finals. One of the judges later told them that if they had a prototype in the market, Messo would have gone through.
Soon, the couple had that judge come aboard as a mentor and Messo was up for development in Prague. “The developers took quite some time and the prototype was bad. It wouldn’t work,” Waller says. In the end, the deal was ended amicably — the mentor gave back the equity to the couple, and the developers gave them the code.
“At that point, we happened to meet with the team behind the popular Careem taxi-booking app. They loved the basic prototype of Messo. The team said that they have a full-fledged tech house in Pakistan and we should see what they could do,” says Waller.
Stripped out to its bare bones and redeveloped with fresh verve, Messo took 10 months to be built. On October 1, Messo was up on iTunes, 27 months after the idea surfaced.
Meanwhile, with the working prototype ready in time for AMAC 2015, the duo flew down to Dubai in January, participated in the finals and won the opportunity to pitch Messo at the GSMA Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry.
It was “a fantastic situation”, says Waller. “The event was from March 1 to 5 at Barcelona. Thibault was due to be born on March 8. So there I was, three days before my son was to be born, pitching Messo in Barcelona while praying that he wouldn’t be born too early,” he says, with a chuckle.
All went well and Waller was back in Doha in good time. To test the waters, the couple hit upon a ploy. “As we got out the very first version of Messo in the market, we uploaded Thibault’s photo on it and then went on Facebook and announced that we had a baby and we won’t put up his photos here,” says Waller, smiling, “If you want to see him, we said, download Messo and leave a comment there.”
What greeted the earliest visitors of Messo was a delightful portrait of baby Thibault, his incredibly fluffy cheeks and deep, bright eyes, beckoning a cheery stream of gushes and good wishes.
This audio roster of their friends’ and families’ first reactions to their newborn seems to carry more nostalgic heft than mere text would summon. “When we look back at it five or 10 years from now, this would be a much more emotional experience than scrolling through 100 comments on Facebook that are mostly Congrats Kiss Kiss,” Waller reasons.
A well-devised breakaway from the visually and textually saturated realm of social networking, Messo explores an alternate dimension where audio is king. “With audio commenting, you push people into a new comfort zone but it’s a much more personal comfort zone. So there are less chances of misunderstanding than what reading a sentence can invite,” Waller says.
Among the first few comments is that of Waller’s cousin’s daughter Lily, a three-year-old who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to type and comment. “Hello, this is Lily. I love his hat so much and I love him even more. So bye bye and I love you,” the girl’s voice rings with touching innocence. Waller also points out how Messo manages to catch her “at a specific moment of her life where she is unique.”
“Sooner or later, we will catch a grandparent’s comment on Messo, who is no longer here in five years’ time. But you would have their voice,” Waller explains, “I have lost my dad. I have got voicemails from him on the phone that I had then, and they are mostly unimportant ones such as ‘See you later for dinner’. But being able to hear something from someone that’s beyond the grave is very emotional.”
Rather than silently leaf through a photo album, Messo helps create aural waypoints that elevate the experience. “Basically, we are creating a conversation around memories. You will take a picture while you are on your holiday, capture a sound from there, post them as one on Messo, and suddenly that memory is richer,” says Waller.
The duo has often been asked about the possibility of Instagram introducing audio commenting feature and destroying Messo in one blow. “That won’t happen,” Waller says confidently, “Instagram won’t drop text commenting. Messo’s key feature is that it doesn’t allow text. If you want to use Messo, you have got to commit to being present in the moment.”
While the focus now is on capturing the fancy of the social networking community, the app will eventually introduce native ads much like sponsored feed on Twitter. To keep things fun, you can gamify your Messo, which, for instance, can be scrambling an image before you send it. The recipient won’t be able to unlock it until they have unscrambled the image against the clock.
From cracking one-liners to sharing tiny music pieces to wishing happy birthdays, the Messo possibilities are certainly numerous. “Also, it’s a very different experience to watch a video of a street musician in action than looking at his photo and listening to the audio,” Waller says.
Concurring with Waller, Correa sums it up. “Messo makes you alive. When you go to restaurants, you see people taking pictures of their food. With Messo, you can keep taking pictures but you and your friends or family can join in saying aloud something like bon appétit together, and it just adds a lot to that moment and memory.