On February 20, 2020, ACT | The App Association visited The Schlafly Tap Room, a St. Louis, Missouri based brewery, to engage with developers about the local tech community, Missouri’s app economy, and general trends and opportunities for tech businesses. Through this event we met CJ Pasley and Kevin Hagens, co-founders of Topik.Below, CJ and Kevin talk about the relationships small business can form with platforms and share how they have used the tools available to developers through the platforms to get ready to launch their new app.

I first met CJ while we were in high school. I heard his name a lot not only from sports but from his customers in the hallway. CJ noticed that our school vending machine had very limited options, so in turn, he began selling sodas from his locker. From afar, I noticed him racking up money during lunch hours. It became such a well-known business that teachers began buying from him, and other students started copying the model. Early on I knew that CJ was someone with a keen business mind — after all, he created a competitive beverage economy in a small private high school. After high school, I focused hard on engineering, and it just so happened that CJ and I attended the same university in Chicago. The moment I got the idea for Topik, an app that takes blogging on the go for the everyday person, I knew he was the first person who should see the prototype. I guess you can say the rest was history.

Topik, like my side business in high school, is a simple idea built around the need for a certain product or service. It’s that simple. Blogging has been around since the birth of the internet and has been the inspiration for some of the first, and most successful, social networks. Once the world began to expand the mobile space, people spent less time in front of computers and laptops and more time on their phones. Topik is merging those two worlds by being the first blogging app that is mobile-first in its design. We have spent many years developing (and deleting) prototypes to make sure we solve the problem efficiently. What is “the problem” in the blogging world? On average there are about 4,000 people per day that consider starting a blog, but never do. After analyzing the “why,” Kevin and I found that many delay starting a blog because of anxiety around perfection, the amount of time it takes to design a blog, and the build-up of waiting to get to your laptop or desktop. Topik breaks all barriers of that anxiety and gives users everything they need to start their blog immediately. How? First, by bringing the process of blogging to the users mobile device, making accessibility instantaneous. Next, Kevin builds an algorithm that drives inspiration by providing the user topics for what they are most interested in. Finally, Topik provides custom layouts to simplify the design phase of any blog. Essentially, Topik solves the problem of simplified storytelling for 1.5 million people a year, by decreasing anxiety and increasing creativity. We also work to stay current with the most polished open source and cloud technologies. Kevin works on everything digital from engineering to the media content, while I handle marketing, press, and the branding related side of things. Kevin and I have never had more than three or four people working on Topik at one time, so it is crucial that we leverage larger platforms as we scale.

Building software from the ground up is an extremely challenging task. Engineers have to take into account security, data, user experience, analytics, testing, and legalities. Trying to design and maintain all this from scratch is nearly impossible with a small team, unless you are leveraging open source software and big platforms like Amazon Web Services or Facebook. Large digital platforms have made it possible for a number of small startup companies to grow in an unprecedented way. Without these platforms, competition in the app marketplace would be virtually non-existent, as the cost to launch software products would skyrocket back to the times of the early ‘90s. Topik would not be where it is today without these readily available resources.

Topik lives in a sea of apps that strive to use all resources available to effectively solve consumer problems on a large scale. As these apps continue to evolve, so will the need for platforms that support them. The app economy could not be successful without the vast numbers of different cloud services and APIs that keep them functioning. We are extremely passionate about using technology to better evolve and grow the human experience. Thanks to all of the advisors, professors, peers, and mentors that have helped guide us to this point, Topik will be released to the App Store later this year. As a small business, we will soon revolutionize the blogging experience, but we recognize this could not have been done without platforms and the thriving app economy that has come from those platforms. In order for innovation to continue, it’s imperative that lawmakers consider the stories and success from small businesses like ours.