After wowing the audience at DemoCamp last autumn, Halifax-based Glitch Wizard is now hoping users upload more images on to social media using the app.
Founded by developers Connor Bell and Allan Lavell, Glitch Wizard is an app that uses filters to distort images, GIFs and videos to give them a computer-crash aesthetic. Glitch Wizard allows the user to have fun with their images rather than post exactly what the camera captures.
The Halifax-based duo broke even the first day they launched Glitch Wizard on the Canadian and American Apple app stores last September. For every sale, they take 70 percent of the $2.29 that the app sells for on the Canadian app store; then, Bell and Lavell each receive half of that money. They said their daily earnings from the app is enough to buy both of them a fancy lunch.
In the time they aren’t working on Glitch Wizard, Lavell works as a freelance developer, and Bell is completing his bachelor of science in computer science and mathematics from Dalhousie University. They also work at Halifax programming company Twisted Oak.
Bell and Lavell drew huge applause from the crowd at Halifax’s Democamp last autumn, where they pitched Glitch Wizard in under five minutes.
Lavell said that he’s more interested in buyers’ engagement with Glitch Wizard at this stage than with the numbers of downloads. When they made the app free for two days, they saw 8,500 downloads. He added he wants to see users uploading more pictures on the app on a frequent basis, then uploading those pictures to Twitter with #glitchwizard.
In the 2.0 version the duo released in October, they added a “submit to feature” button to the app. This means that once users upload their photos to the app, they can press the “submit to feature” button, which sends the photo to Lavell and Bell. The duo pick the best glitched photos and feature them on the homepage of the app. They said that this has been a huge success.
“It’s a complex enough tool that there’s a lot of diverse ways to approach using it,” Lavell said, “and there’s guaranteed that there’s someone’s going to come up with something that we haven’t thought of.”
Glitch Wizard finds its biggest successes in the social media realm. Lavell said he’ll often glitch artwork and tweet it to the artist, who often will retweet the Glitch. Bell said that he hopes to create more filters for the app, including a double exposure one, in which two images are blended together and then glitched.
“This is a sweet art-making tool,” Lavell said. “If you’re cool, go get it.”
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