The Expresser app lets ordinary Joes rub elbows with celebrities - in text messages
However cute their little mugs may be, sometimes emoji are just not enough.
Why use a smiley face with a furrowed brow in a text message when you can have Chris Christie making a "Why I oughta!" face? And why send a speaker emoji with a red line across it when you can illustrate the concept with a picture of Larry David covering his ears ("Keep it down!!")?
Or -- better yet -- why not use your very own facial expressions to get your point across?
Enter the Expresser app. Created by two friends from Essex County, the app provides a selection of celebrity faces, or photo "stickers," that can be sent to a third-party keyboard installed on cell phones. When users click on the keyboard's human emoji -- what they call "expressers" -- they can then paste that image into a text message.
Haig Jean, at left, and Ricky Isibor, founders of the Expresser app, met as engineering majors at NJIT. (Hairic/Expresser)The result: a customizable stable of moments: Cookie from "Empire" nonchalantly filing her nails, Caitlyn Jenner grinning on the cover of Vanity Fair and President Obama, enraptured at the White House Correspondents' dinner.
With more than one million downloads of Expresser so far, the app has found an audience largely through word-of-mouth, say its creators, Haig Jean and Ricky Isibor.
"It's pretty much taken on a life of its own," says Isibor, 32. Celebrities including singer Chris Brown and rapper Fabolous have reached out to he and Jean after hearing about the app and seeing how users can paste their faces into everyday text conversations.
Some of the expressers available on the app. (Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)The alternative -- doing a Google image search, saving the photo and then pasting it into the text -- proved too tedious a process for Jean and Isibor, and, they figured, many other texters.
The Newark natives both grew up in Irvington but met as engineering students in the Educational Opportunity Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Isibor majored in electrical engineering and Jean in industrial engineering. After college, Jean worked in sales and marketing for Verizon Wireless and Isibor worked as an electrical engineer. They had a background in coding but teamed with a developer to bring their idea for an app to life, forming the company Hairic -- a combination of their two first names -- in 2012.
In July 2014, Isibor and Jean, 33, released a beta version of Expresser, a free app they financed themselves. After Apple released iOS 8 -- its first mobile operating system to allow custom, third-party keyboards -- they came out with a new version of Expresser that could work with the iPhone's existing keyboard. By the end of the year, Expresser had generated more than 300,000 free downloads on Apple's App Store.
(By comparison, the current top-ranked free app on the iOS store is the game Monument Valley. The app, which previously cost $4 and was recently made free, claimed 500,000 downloads last year in little more than a month.)
Jean and Isibor revamped Expresser in February of 2015, adding in-app purchases through which anyone could pay $4.99 for the app to turn their photo into an expresser. In October, they released a new version of the app for Android.
A blurb pops up when you press an expresser, detailing the context for the image. (Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) Jean and Isibor are hoping that Expresser isn't only an app where people go to find memes to use in texts -- Jean estimates there are more than 300 expressers -- but also one where they go to learn more about them. The app provides a short blurb for each image that adds context.
For instance, when you press the photo of Gene Wilder from the 1971 film "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" -- a picture known as the "Condescending Wonka" meme -- you get a little blurb that says, "Gene made this expression in a scene in which Willy Wonka asks the children if they would like to see a new candy he is working on called 'The Everlasting Gobstopper.'"
"The real purpose of the app is to be like a Wikipedia for these funny memes," Isibor says.
Users can submit their own expressers or send in a photo and pay for a custom expresser. (Expresser/Hairic)The app itself is responsible for about 80 percent of the images used for the emoji, which are devised with the help of requests and recommendations. The other portion -- user images -- are submitted through an approval process. In this way, random non-celebrity faces can be seen alongside Lloyd (Jim Carrey) from "Dumb and Dumber" and a dramatically sobbing Kim Kardashian.
Isibor and Jean employ app developers, photo editors and server administrators. So far, they say they haven't run into any copyright violation issues.
"Should that change, we plan to work within a take-down notice model, if a license holder complains," Isibor says.
The app also includes links to some celebrities' Instagram pages at the bottom of the descriptive entries for their expressers.
"Martin Lawrence reached out to us," Isibor says. "It's like a chain reaction."
Their next goal is to form partnerships with more celebrities and brands (there are already ads in the app) -- Isibor says one such project is in the works.
"We're definitely just one step away from signing a deal with a major person to take us to the next level," he says.
The inevitable smiling (?) Trump. (Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)But the idea of everyone being a celebrity in their own circle seems to have struck a chord.
"I think the users are more excited to see their own faces," Jean says. "There's one of my own face that I use a lot." He generally calls this expresser his "excitement" face, handily deployed for trash-talking during a bowling game, for instance.
The son of Haitian immigrants, Jean is married and lives in Fanwood. Isibor, who lives in Morris County, comes from a family of six, including three pharmacists, one other engineer and a prospective medical student. He says his entrepreneurial spirit comes from his father, a part-time professor at Essex County College who started Newark Transitional, a homeless shelter, in the 1980s.
Jean and Isibor found another mentor in Travis Kahn, who works with dozens of early-stage technology startups at NJIT's New Jersey Innovation Institute.
"They have one of the most essential elements of a successful entrepreneur, and that is drive," says Kahn, 33, of the pair. A former executive director TechLaunch, a technology accelerator in northern New Jersey that supports startups, Kahn also teaches entrepreneurship at Stevens Institute of Technology. Very few startups can claim the kind of traction that Jean and Isibor have gained, he says.
"They're part of a growing club of people who are really pushing the entrepreneurship scene in Newark," he says.
Kahn says what strikes him about Expresser and its sense of humor is that it not only holds celebrity appeal, but also can be easily integrated into a mobile routine. When he got his hands on emoji of his childrens' faces, he realized how much he would actually use them in daily text messages.
"It's a part of my life that I get a kick out of," he says. "And that's stickiness."
Jean and Isibor say they have potential investors interested in Expresser. In the meantime, they've been reinvesting earnings from in-app purchases -- they're not releasing information on how much they've made -- into improvement and expansion of the company, with the hopes of getting their expressers on other messaging services and social media.
"With the right resources, we know this can become a reality," Isibor says.