One of those people was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was so taken with Cycloramic's vibration-induced spinning that he posted a 360-degree video of himself taken by the app on Facebook only a week after the app's release. (Today, that video has more than 1.1 million views on YouTube.)Īmazingly, the outreach worked, and a small group of people started downloading the app and spreading the word about Cycloramic. "I also created a quick video so I could send a link with my email," Francois says, detailing a sales pitch that he sent out to roughly 20 people in the week before Christmas 2012. His search results told him that he needed to get the app in front of "influencers" in the tech industry, as well as writers covering startups.
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Then "I Googled 'How to promote an app,'" Francois now tells CNBC Make It while laughing. Once the phone is in motion, Cycloramic takes multiple images or videos and stitches them together in sequence to create the 360-degree effect, as the iPhone's own panoramic photo mode can only capture 240-degree shots. You could simply stand the iPhone up on its flat edge, step away, and watch the smartphone spin around for a hands-free, 360-degree shot. What he came up with was Cycloramic, an app that could make any ordinary iPhone 5 slowly spin around on its own to take a 360-degree photo or video using the smartphone's own gyroscope and vibration function. He scrambled to develop the final product and then obtain approvals from the Apple App Store as the calendar pushed into December 2012. In the final months of the year, he still didn't have a definite app idea pinned down It was at that point that he realized that millions of iPhone owners would likely flock to a hands-free option for panoramic photos. By December of 2012, he says he had less than $3,000 left from the $150,000 he'd saved for the year. He'd previously been working out of his basement. Six months into the venture, Francois began renting some office space in Atlanta, which sent his costs spiking. He also kicked around the idea of somehow using some of the iPhone's existing features in his app, including vibration, after he noticed his own vibrating iPhone moving across a flat table by itself.
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He got as far as actually creating only "three or four" of those ideas, though, and none of them gained much traction.
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He gave himself a one-year deadline to achieve that goal with Egos Ventures, liquidating his 401(k) account and taking all of his savings (with everything adding up to about $150,000) to keep himself afloat personally and professionally for that year while he, along with two interns, tried to come up with a winning formula for a viral app.įrancois spent nearly all of 2012 cycling through different app ideas - "it feels like hundreds," he says now -from a social networking play to apps matching users based on mutual interests. Francois was 40 years old in 2011, when he took his first leap into the viral app market by founding Egos Ventures and leaving Francois & Co., an Atlanta-based company he ran with his brother that sells home products like stone flooring, countertops and fireplaces. So, his goal was to prove that "no, there is not an app for yet."įrancois, who studied mechanical engineering as an undergraduate and later earned a Master's degree in computer science at the University of Central Florida, tells CNBC Make It that he left a safe, steady job at his family company, where he'd served as president for more than seven years, to scratch an entrepreneurial itch in the tech world and, specifically, to create the next viral app. "It was the, 'there is an app for that' period back then," Francois says. Francois had been watching the success of early viral apps like Foursquare or Angry Birds in the first few years after Apple released the first iPhone in 2008. Car360's goal is to make it easier for online car sellers to showcase their vehicles on the internet, so Phoenix-based Carvana bought the start-up to improve its own 360-degree visuals of the used cars it sells online.īut long before Francois hit on Car360, he was an entrepreneur looking to create the next viral app - a goal that would take him through multiple products. In April 2018, Carvana acquired Car360, the company Francois, 47, launched in 2015 that uses augmented reality technology and 3-D computer vision to allow people to take 360-degree photos of automobiles with a mobile phone.