The app tells stories through dialogues that read like text message conversation.
By Sreekanth A Nair
Indian American Prerna Gupta’s ‘snapchat generation’ app is gaining ground in America and also getting noticed by Silicon Valley investors.
Gupta is the founder and CEO of Hooked, a medium-blending app that features short fiction for young readers. The app tells stories through dialogues that read like text message conversation. Each message appears on the screen when next button is clicked.
Each book will be roughly 1,000 words and is designed to be read in about five minutes.
Hooked lets you read one story a day for free, but users who want a broader range of access will have to subscribe. Unlimited access cost anywhere between $3 a week and $40 a year.
The company has raised $2.9 million so far and is valued at $15 million.
“We feel like we’ve got what we need to make things successful. Our belief is that there’s a big opportunity to build something like YouTube that builds on narrative,” Gupta told Business Insider.
The stories on Hooked are all commissioned by parent company Telepathic, of which Gupta is CEO, but their long-term plans include turning Hooked into a writing platform based on the model of Wattpad or Medium, only with a focus on much shorter works.
Her long-term goal is to make everyone using the app to write fiction. “One of the things we hope Hooked will do is encourage more people to write fiction and to understand that we all have the ability to express ourselves in this way,” Gupta had said earlier.
“Obviously writing a 100,000-word novel is daunting for most people. But writing a 1,000-word text-message story—maybe that’s something that’s more accessible to a broader set of people.”
Gupta’s personal website says that she was previously Chief Product Officer at Smule, where she built music apps, like AutoRap that helps people creating music. She has also produced several viral videos totaling over 300 million views. Prerna has been named one of the Most Influential Woman in Tech by Fast Company.
She is also an angel investor and a resident mentor at 500 Startups.