Cast Two Point Oh (2.0)
I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your time, your opinions, your feelings and your amazing casts! Seeing you enjoy and engage with the app we created is an incredibly humbling feeling. It keeps us focused on our vision and pushes us to continue working hard to continue improving Cast for you.
We created Cast because we had a problem with the current social media landscape. We felt we could no longer share our honest feelings and opinions. We couldn’t find a platform to give us a truly objective and unbiased view of public opinion. We knew that we weren’t the only ones that felt this way, but we had no idea how many people were as passionate about this problem as we were. Through all your feedback, both in app and when chatting with people in the parks and streets of Toronto, we are resolute in our belief that the world needs Cast.
When we started building Cast a year ago, we had a rough idea of how we wanted the app to function; but for the most part we just figured out everything on the fly. Though we may not be first time founders, we’ve never founded a tech startup so we had to learn a lot in a short amount of time. Quick shoutout to our incredible engineering team who have brought our vision to life. They’ve taught us some invaluable lessons, like the importance of avoiding scope creep, and other common startup pitfalls. Graydyn, Chance, Brendan, and Greg — you guys are the real MVP’s!
Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) once said, “starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down.” That pretty much summarizes the past 12 months for us. More often than not, we were flying by the seat of our pants. Thankfully, we didn’t crash and we got our plane built. We took that plane out for a test run during our short beta but knew we would have to upgrade this plane quickly in order to compete with all the current social media platforms. Now that we’re flying stable, we figured it was a good time to start to upgrade this jet and throw on some bells and whistles.
Today, we unveil to you our new plane that we intend to fly to new heights! Today, we give you CAST TWO POINT OH (2.0)! We’ve taken everything we learned over the past year and put it into this new version of Cast. Cast 2.0 is our gift to you and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed creating it (though our engineering team might have some objections to how enjoyable it really was…).
You’ll notice a few major changes to the app. First, we’ve upgraded the Curated page to have all the content fit into one screen, which now allows you to scroll vertically. Kind of like this really popular app that rhymes with slickrock. You will now find the comments and demographics on the right side tabs. We’ve improved the Create a Cast page so you can visualize what your content will look like before you publish it. We also added custom backgrounds so you can personalize your casts. We updated the look of your profile and we added in ‘Saved’ and ‘Recast’. ‘Saved’ does exactly what it sounds like — Save Casts — but no one will see what content you save. ‘Recast’ allows you to share the content you love with your followers. If you see a cast that you think deserves more attention, hit the share button on the right side and click ‘Recast’. Spread the love y’all!
There’s a whole lot more that went into Cast 2.0 but I won’t bore you with a long(er) winded blog post. I’ve been told far too many times that my writing is too long. Plus my cool co-founder DB posted a great write up on our App Store listing. Go give that a read if you want to know what else is in Cast 2.0. He may, or may not, be giving away some prizes to those who read the App Store listing (hint: he is!)
I’ll wrap this up since you’ve probably already stopped reading. If you are still reading this: thank you! Without YOU there is no Cast 2.0 and our plane probably wouldn’t have made it. But our plane did make it and a lot of people want a seat on that plane. Which leads me to our final announcement. Cast has raised a $650k Seed Round. This round is a combination of bootstrapping from our founding team, family, friends, and angel investors. We want to thank all of our investors who believe in our team and our vision as much as we do. Your support allows us to hire more incredibly talented people to help us on our journey, and allows us to get Cast into the hands of more people around the world and ultimately, change social media for the better.
Thank you again to everyone who has supported us this far. It means the world to us. Time to get back to work. There are more opinions to be shared!
Sincerely,
George Boutsalis
Co-Founder & CEO
Cast
