Quit Your Job

Haha, well said. That's the next title of my link baity blog post: "10 Ways to Growth Hack Your Way to Success by Pissing People Off" @jrlevine - so I gotta ask. You recently left your role as the GM at Digg. What's next? More silly, fun apps? ;)

Hey everyone, Inspired by an app I made a few months ago (called BreakupText, see above), I made a product that makes it easier to quit your job via SMS. Please try it and let me know if it works. (On a more serious note, I think SMS is an underutilized technology. Everyone is so obsessed with building their own networks and owning communication that we miss out on the benefits of using the most ubiquitous network of all. I think this style of app that generates text messages for you based on some series of inputs could be applied to other use cases... you know, beyond ending relationships. Any ideas?) Jake

@jrlevine Welcome! I wish you would have come out with this sooner. It would have made quitting PlayHaven much easier (see https://medium.com/lessons-learn...). And you know, people are scary. So much easier to send a text. But more seriously, WRT to SMS, I completely agree with you. SMS essentially has a 100% open rate, unlike push notifications and email. Of course, the signal to noise has to be super high. Side note: Coffee Meets Bagel uses SMS very creatively, connecting two potential dates via SMS instead of using in-app messaging. Smart. So what's the backstory to Quit Your Job? How did you come up with the idea and why?

@rrhoover It starts with BreakupText, which was inspired by some friends of a friend. They would meet girls at bars, get numbers, and then of course never heard from them again. Instead of moving on like any normal person, they would send absurdly long and emotional breakup texts. Naturally, I thought it would be a good idea to turn it into an app. I had never worked with iOS development before, and I wanted to learn about it. I don't have an engineering background or anything, but I've been able to hack my way through a few apps. So @laurenleto (who did the writing) and I made BreakupText, and put it in the app store for $0.99. I thought a few friends and my parents would download it. Then it blew up. In a few days the app was featured on Jimmy Fallon and Good Morning America. After that, a few companies approached me to make a version of BreakupText for them. The best idea came from Alex Douzet, who I used to work with at TheLadders. Alex thought it'd be funny to make a BreakupText for you job. The concept was hilarious, so @laurenleto and I put it together. She wrote the copy and I did the design and development. I had the BreakupText template already so it wasn't too tricky. We launched it last week and people are getting a kick out of it: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_...

@jrlevine - Congrats! How did you get BreakupText featured on Jimmy Fallon and Good Morning America? Did you reach out to them and any creative PR tactics to share?

@rrhoover yes, make an app that pisses people off. Seriously though, this app struck a chord with people... it was just believable enough to bring out our luddite tendencies. We're in a moment when we're not sure whether we ought to celebrate or fear technology. BreakupText and Quit Your Job gave people a symbol for "what's wrong with our world." In reality, it just showed that most people don't read past the headline.

@rrhoover hopefully more fun than silly. working on a new project which isn't so much in "stealth" as that I haven't yet figured out how to describe it. I'll probably say something about it in a couple of months.