Happy Birthdaymatic!!!

Precisely 7 years ago, a small app appeared in the Apple Store and went on to radically transform digital photography. On December 9th 2009, Hipstamatic became one of the then 100.000 or so other applications. Today, there are 1,3 million of them!

When I visited the Hipstamatic offices in San Francisco, in 2013, I asked Lucas Buick if he remembered the beginnings of Hipstamatic: "We put out the app in December 2009; the first day I think we sold 10 copies to our friends, but then the next day we sold 100, and the following day we sold 500, the day after that we sold 1000: all of a sudden we had all these people using it. We were the number 1 app in Japan within the first 36 hours, which was crazy, so I called all my designer friends and told them I was big in Japan!"

I also asked Ryan Dorshorst if he remembered when he realized that Hipstamatic was really taking off: "Every morning we would wake up and get an email with how many people had downloaded it the previous day. The first few days it was pretty exciting. We were getting a good number of people downloading it, but then it just started exponentially increasing. It came out early December and it was right around New Year we were like this is really becoming very big, and then, we got featured by Apple. I think that we had 150,000 downloads between when it launched and New Year’s, so it was pretty quick that it jumped up. The first few days it was a few hundred, then a few thousand, and then all of a sudden it really jumped. It was exciting and just crazy to wake up every morning and be like wow it just keeps getting bigger and bigger, more and more people are using this. We were quickly updating it, and adding new things right away, and rapidly trying to support it. It was very exciting."

It’s been quite an adventure since the launch and 7 years on, Hipstamatic remains unique. Often copied, yet never matched, it has revolutionized photography, as we know it today. You can read the full interviews, as well as those I did with Mario Estrada and Aravind Kaimal in the "Inside the Haus"-section.

To celebrate its 7th anniversary, Hipstamatic is proposing a series of 7 pictures, by 7 photographers who have worked closely with Hipstamatic: Diego Uchitel, Chunky, Ben Watts, Victoria Will, David Loftus, Ruddy Roye and Kevin Tachman! Happy Birthdaymatic and many happy returns to Hipstamatic!

This post is also available in: French

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