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Bitstrips founders discuss app's origins

 
This is an example of what Bitstrips’ app interface looks like on Facebook. Comics can feature any friend with it.
This is an example of what Bitstrips’ app interface looks like on Facebook. Comics can feature any friend with it.
Published Jan. 29, 2014

SAN FRANCISCO — Bitstrips may seem like a sudden sensation now that the app maker's comic vignettes are all over Facebook and other social networks, but the Toronto startup's success was a drawn-out process.

The concept for a mobile application that lets people turn their lives into comic strips took shape as a high school diversion more than 20 years ago. That's when high school senior Jacob Blackstock drew a profane spoof of Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt from the Peanuts comic strip and passed it to Shahan Panth, who sat behind him in English class. Even though a teacher reprimanded them for boorish behavior, a snickering Panth encouraged Blackstock to continue expressing his irreverent take on life through comics.

The two friends remained in touch after high school, often relying on comics as a way to communicate and needle each other. When Panth landed his first job out of college at an insurance company, Blackstock made it a point to fax a crude comic featuring his friend each day.

"I can't even repeat some of the things that he would say in those comics, but it was as about bad as you can possibly imagine," Panth says.

Goofing off eventually turned into a business. In 2007, Blackstock and Panth decided to start Bitstrips in an attempt to create a comic strip version of YouTube. Bitstrips remained a novelty service confined to customizing comics within Web browsers until October, when the company released a mobile application for iPhones, iPads and devices running on Android software.

But Blackstock, 38, and Panth, 39, are getting the last laugh as their once-quirky pastime turns into a worldwide phenomenon. More than 30 million people in 90 countries have turned themselves into comic book characters on Bitstrips' mobile apps. Google, which tracks people's interests through its search engine, rated Bitstrips as the trendiest app of 2013, eclipsing Twitter's Vine video app, Facebook's Instragram photo app, King.com's Candy Crush game and SnapChat's ephemeral messaging app.

With hopes of preventing a backlash to its application, Bitstrips recently added options that allow users to share their comics with a limited group of people instead of broadcasting through their Facebook networks or other digital hangouts.

Bitstrips' free mobile apps triggered the craze by making it easy for anyone with a smartphone or tablet computer to quickly create and post comics featuring themselves and a friend depicted in different scenarios. The apps provide thousands of comic scenes to choose from, then allow each user to create their own captions.

The overwhelming response surprised Blackstock and Panth, who had to scramble to increase Bitstrips' computing capacity to keep up with the intense demand. They now have a staff of 17 workers and have raised $3 million from Horizons Ventures in Hong Kong.

The seed money will help keep the service running until Blackstock and Panth figure out how to generate revenue from Bitstrips' rapidly growing audience.

Blackstock, who is nicknamed "BA" in reference to a sound he made as a child, thinks Bitstrips will prove his ideas weren't quite as goofy as they seemed when his high school English teacher caught him drawing cheeky comics a couple decades ago.

"We don't see this as a joke engine," Blackstock says. "We see this as a new medium for self-expression."