MakeEmoji Turns Six
It's our birthday!
Howdy emoji aficionados!
Matt from MakeEmoji here. It's MakeEmoji's 6th Birthday!
Six years ago, on November 16, 2019, I nervously hit publish on our Product Hunt launch. It was only the 8th-most-upvoted product on Product Hunt that day. I did virtually no marketing or promotion for it at all. Instead, I focused relentlessly on making the product as great as I could.
MakeEmoji was born out of a simple idea: I wanted to make funny Slack emojis of my coworkers, and I loved animated custom emojis most of all. But there were zero simple tools anywhere to do this. In 2016, Googling "how to make animated custom emojis" turned up a bunch of guides on how to manually construct frames one at a time in Photoshop.
It was incredibly frustrating. There were standard "patterns" for animation styles that I saw everywhere: rotate hue and animate into a 'party' movement, or stick onto the head of nyan cat or party parrot, or slide, or spin. These could apply to almost any image.
I dreamed of something drop-dead simple. I didn't want to click through a multi-step wizard. I didn't want to click some WYSIWYG UI to painstakingly rotate an image frame by frame. I just wanted to DROP an image and see A BUNCH OF GIFS INSTANTLY! WHY DIDN'T THAT EXIST ALREADY?
So I made it.
At first, traffic was a trickle. But the trickle slowly grew. MakeEmoji spread through word of mouth: a comment here on reddit, a tweet there, a mention in a TikTok on creating custom emotes. Finally, it started to be mentioned at the top of "How to Make Animated Custom Emojis" listicles.
MakeEmoji has grown from that unknown toy site to the #1 destination for creating animated custom emojis on the internet. Over a million creators have used it to jazz up their streams and servers. Thousands of creators use MakeEmoji every day to turn their coworkers' faces, streamer emotes, and favorite memes into animated GIFs.
And it's all thanks to you. I couldn't have done it without you. Thank you for using MakeEmoji and for sharing it with your friends.
Yours in emojimaking,
Matt
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