People create WhatsApp and Facebook groups for everything, and you are giving away personal information to people you don’t really know that well. Lemon Group Messenger is about creating group messages without needing your phone number or contact information to sign up. It’s for creating casual groups without knowing that well the people you want in the group. Lemon started as an app for university, where students could create a group chat with other members of a classroom by only sharing the unique code given by the app; this would help users interact with each other and not miss out on important information given to the class. Additionally, school platforms are not cool, so students do not want to use them to interact with each other. It takes a long time to get everyone’s information so you can create a group with them, it’s a hassle for the administrator, and then everyone will have your phone number or private information. In Lemon, you as an admin don’t add the users, you create the group and the users enter your group using your group code.
Founder and CEO Arturo Lemmen is a 23 year old international business management student from Mexico City. He has always been fascinated by computers and technology, and was very passionate about the idea of Lemon Messenger. As he could not find a team to build the app in time, Arturo had to do it on his own – people did not believe that he would actually go through it, but that only fueled his persistence to succeed. As he puts it, “people not believing in you is the key to success.”
In addition to getting people to believe in his mission, Arturo cites finding a team, crashes on the app, and starting up a tech startup with no previous knowledge on how to create an app or business. Lemon targets a general audience – students, office workers, and so on. For now, they want to have incredibly happy customers – once they have a group of happy customers, then they will expand. After all, it is better to have a small group of people that love your app than to have a big group that hate it. Right now, monetization is not a priority; Arturo wants happy customers that really love the app so that a lemon community can be created. Monetizing will happen in Phase 2 or Phase 3, but the opportunities of monetizing are endless once Lemon has happy customers – that is all that matters for now.