If you had checked the App Store's top paid chart in the US on Sunday, March 27, you would have seen mostly familiar games like "Minecraft" and "HeadsUp!" About 24 hours later, an unknown studying app called Summize had dethroned them all to take the coveted top spot.
Summize costs $0.99 to download and advertises the ability to quickly scan a textbook page or news article and summarize its key points. It sounds like a dream come true for the modern test taker.
In an interview with Tech Insider, the three teenagers behind Summize explained how their studying app managed to conquer the App Store's charts in 24 hours with barely any press coverage and an advertising budget of less than $25,000.
(Shortly after this story was published, Summize was taken off the App Store. Its developer tweeted an explanation saying the removal was temporary "as we work to iron out issues for the next update.")
A savvy social media push
The brains behind the marketing of Summize are Carter Bjorklund, an 18-year-old living in Minnesota and Aiden Craig, a 16-year-old homeschooler from Canada.
Craig met Summize's 18-year-old developer, Rami Ghanem, at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas in mid March. “He had a lot of textbook pages to read and he wanted to figure out an easy solution to totally solve that problem.” Craig said of Ghanem, who couldn't be part of a Skype interview because he was in class at the University of Calgary in Canada.
While most apps rely on targeted Facebook ads, endorsements from social media celebrities, and a blitz of press coverage to get noticed, Summize stayed completely under the radar when it was first released on March 9.
It wasn't until an update to Summize on March 27 that an elaborate social media push began. With a budget of less than $25,000, Craig and Bjorklund created fake accounts to promote the app and paid other social media stars with large followings, like Vine star @okaymoe and Instagram star @jerkful, to retweet their posts.
“We’re influencers ourselves so we have a lot of those contacts already,” said Bjorklund. "It wasn’t too difficult to reach out.”
Instead of giving influencers with large followings something to tweet, they used fake accounts they owned to monitor engagement as tweets picked up steam. “While they’re [influencers] promoting them we can monitor the analytics on them, things like engagements, impressions, and all of that in one place,” Bjorklund said.
“Our focus was to get creative with it and just make as many different types of ads as we could," he said. “We tried to take the app and incorporate it into funny tweets where the tweets literally would go viral. Some of our posts would get 15, 20,000 likes from pushing with influencers. Ads don’t usually do that type of thing.”
Plenty of other apps use fake social media accounts to promote, but Bjorklund and Craig believe their efforts were a success because of how they carefully crafted what was shared. Craig and Bjorklund declined to say exactly how much money they spent on promotion other than under $25,000 of their "personal money." They also wouldn't say how much they paid people to tweet about Summize.
“Their ads look like ads," Craig said of other app developers. "Versus with our strategy we used a variety of creativity to make ads that would go viral and get the most exposure possible but also give people an idea of what Summize is and why they should go download it.”
The results speak for themselves. They watched Summize rise from number 80 in the App Store's paid utilities chart to number 4 and then the number 4 paid spot overall.
The app's roller coaster rise reached a crescendo when Summize hit the top of the App Store in under 24 hours. Just after midnight on March 29, Craig tweeted a screenshot of Summize in the top spot with the caption "HOLY CRAP ITS LIT #1 SQUAD."
A mixed response
—Riccardo (@RMvsGaming) March 29, 2016
Since it climbed the charts, Summize has been met with a polarizing response from students saying they either love the app or feel completely ripped them off.
“It was never our intention to have the app be viewed as a quick buck or something that doesn’t work properly," said Craig. "We put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that the app works.”
As the app's developer, Ghanem's only other public project was an enterprise software suite that got him featured on an episode of the TV show "Dragons' Den," which is like the Canadian version of "Shark Tank."
To scan and summarize text, Ghanem said Summize uses a combination "of licensed and proprietary tech." Its main abilities to read text from a photo and summarize text are both powered by outside sources. Ghanem confirmed that there is no artificial intelligence used in the app's current iteration.
Summize's claimed ability to perform content, bias, and keyword analysis on a chunk of text sounds like the "Cliffsnotes for everything" tool that students dream about. The idea is that simply scanning a psychology textbook will show each vocabulary word on a page. Imagine being able to pull out every important date on the page of a history book.
Bjorklund said most people are having problems with Summize not working because they're not taking clear enough pictures of text or trying to scan only a few paragraphs at a time. He said the app is intended to work with full textbook pages and news stories with lots of text. The team is working to make instructions clearer in a future update.
—Josh. (@DipAndBeer) March 29, 2016
—Josh. (@DipAndBeer) March 29, 2016
—Robbie Martini (@TheRoosterMart) March 29, 2016
People have accused the Summize team of paying for positive reviews in the App Store, which they deny. "Early positive reviews in the app are not fake," Ghanem said via email. "We have a strong community backing the app and the reviews are genuine thoughts of the app."
Enjoying the success
—Jordan (@JordanMBiz) March 30, 2016
Regardless of the app's mixed reception, Bjorklund, Craig, and Ghanem have been thrust into the lime light due to their success with Summize. Ghanem said he's already been contacted by "a bunch" of venture capitalists looking to invest, but declined to name anyone specifically.
Summize is getting lots of love on Product Hunt, a popular Reddit-like site for surfacing new apps and products in the tech community. Press coverage of the app has been slow, but the three-person team is proving that all they need is their wits on social media to get noticed. They plan to start promoting on Facebook and Snapchat next.
Summize's viral success will likely be key to keeping it positioned high in the App Store. An app at its price makes roughly $15,000 per day in the top paid spot, according to estimates from developers Tech Insider spoke with.
Whether Summize continues to get attention or not, it's achieved something most apps aren't able to do with millions of dollars in funding and celebrity backing. And that's a fact the guys behind Summize take pride in. If you look Bjorklund, Craig, and Ghanem up on Twitter, you'll see that they have the same cover photo:
For now.
