Chroma Stories is an Instagram competitor built by insiders, meaning lead developers behind Instagram Stories and Boomerang. The group of former Instagram and Facebook employees — Alex Li, Joshua Harris and John Barnett — left their jobs to start a new venture building features for the growing Stories revolution.

Chroma Stories operates as a stories-adjacent tool — it offers a variety of templates, motion presets, filters and text tools to level up your stories (whether that’s on Instagram or elsewhere). On Instagram proper, you have five fonts you can work with in your Stories. On Snapchat there’s nine. On Chroma, there’s 20 fonts and over 150 templates (for free), and even more when you opt for the app’s $30 annual subscription. 📱

Chroma is joining an interesting space. It’s part of a group of startups that aren’t trying to build the “next big social media company” but trying to build the next big tool for people already using Facebook, Instagram, Snap, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube or whatever. The Chroma folks want to be competitive by making social media users feel unique in the sea of Stories, posts and likes. This type of tool is in the same vein as VSCO, the photo editing app currently has 40 million monthly users (with 75% of them under 25).

Some other apps we’ve seen in this space include Unfold (recently acquired by Squarespace), Buffer Stories Creator, Kapwing Story Templates, Featured.

In this week’s edition of Product Hunt Radio, we talked to Sequoia partner Mike Vernal about the early days at Facebook, transitioning to VC, and advice for founders seeking funding.

We’ll be back next week with another special guest, so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. 😸