The video features an interview with Ben and Dan Silvertown, co-founders of Laps, a social camera app and friends-only photo journal. The duo discusses their early entrepreneurial ventures, the inspiration for creating Laps, and how their different skills and family bond have contributed to their business partnership. They share the story of how a trip to Vietnam in 2019 inspired a return to simpler, film-like photography, which influenced the development of Laps. The app is designed to capture photos in the moment for later development, evoking the special excitement of film photography, and is aimed at creating a more genuine social media experience.

Laps has rapidly evolved from a group-centric disposable camera idea to a broader everyday journaling tool, taking care to respond to user feedback while sticking to their core vision. The Silvertown brothers emphasize the importance of high frequency engagement to retain users, aiming for their app to become the default choice for everyday photo-taking for Gen Z users, many of whom are using Laps more frequently than their device's native camera app. With a focus on authenticity and addressing user needs, they've embraced rapid iteration and user feedback without losing sight of their initial goals.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. orthogonal [ɔːrˈθɒɡənl] - (adjective) - Describes something that is at right angles to something else, often used metaphorically for ideas or features that are unrelated or independent. - Synonyms: (unrelated, independent, separate)

And actually our answer to that is maybe quite surprising because we actually think we're moving in an orthogonal direction to generative AI.

2. philosophy [fɪˈlɒsəfi] - (noun) - A system of beliefs or principles that guide behavior or actions. - Synonyms: (beliefs, principles, doctrine)

So for me, the kind of common thread through all of that has been a passion for building agnostic of the industry.

3. epidemic [ˌɛpɪˈdɛmɪk] - (noun) - A widespread occurrence of an infectious disease or a particular undesirable phenomenon within a community at a particular time. - Synonyms: (outbreak, plague, surge)

But I think worse, it's actually created this sort of epidemic of anxiety and depression in young people.

4. iterating [ˈɪtəreɪtɪŋ] - (verb) - The process of repeating a sequence of operations to yield results successively closer to a desired outcome. - Synonyms: (repeating, recapitulating, revising)

So can you walk me through. Yeah. What it looks like right now and what it used to look like? Yeah, I mean for us, iterating very quickly is kind of at the heart of what we do.

5. demographic [ˌdɛməˈɡræfɪk] - (noun) - A specific segment of the population having particular characteristics in common, such as age, gender, or income. - Synonyms: (population group, category, sector)

What does the demographic of users look like today?

6. frequency [ˈfriːkwənsi] - (noun) - The rate at which something occurs or is repeated over a particular period or in a given sample. - Synonyms: (occurrence, rate, regularity)

I guess probably what you just raised there, Dan, was actually something I think we didn't appreciate. It's going into building consumer social media was the frequency of the product matters a lot.

7. cohort [ˈkoʊhɔrt] - (noun) - A group of people having a statistical relationship or set of shared characteristics, often used in research or analysis. - Synonyms: (group, team, batch)

What does the demographic of users look like today? Is there an age, is there a region who is really on lapse right now? Yeah, there's a strong bias towards Gen Z and a strong bias towards females, which is actually really exciting for us because I think if you look at most of the large staple social platforms, the early adopter cohort was young females at the time

8. authenticity [ˌɔːθɛnˈtɪsɪti] - (noun) - The quality or condition of being genuine or undisputed in origin. - Synonyms: (genuineness, realness, originality)

What do you think authenticity means, like, in practice?

9. consultant [kənˈsʌltənt] - (noun) - An expert who gives professional or expert advice in a particular area. - Synonyms: (advisor, specialist, expert)

For me, I get my joy from building large businesses and I started my career as a consultant when I started then a bootstrap business which we exited and then we started working together.

10. aesthetic [ɛsˈθɛtɪk] - (noun / adjective) - Concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty; a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement. - Synonyms: (visual style, design, artistic taste)

And that's from the aesthetic, from the branding.

How Two Brothers Raised $42 Million For A Social Media Startup Rooted In Nostalgia

Think if you can create value for users. And back to our point about frequency on a daily basis, that's how you retain users. Hi everyone. We are here with Ben and Dan Silvertown, the co-founders of Laps. Thank you both so much for joining me today. Nice, thanks. Thanks for having us out. So I'm super excited to talk about what you guys are building in the kind of social media photography space. But I want to hear it from your words first. What are you guys building today? Who are you guys? Give me like a 30-second rundown.

Yeah, sure. So Laps is a social camera app and it's connected to a friends-only photojournal. And it's funny because we started working together actually when I was 13 and Ben was 11. So at the time I taught myself to build websites and I was very unartistic and so I bullied Ben, who was like I said 11 at the time, into learning a program called Real Draw Pro so he could basically design the websites which I would then build and sell online. I didn't even know he was selling them. So it was actually in fundraising. We were talking about this story and Dan was saying, oh yeah, and I was actually selling the website. So I was what? So you were doing the work and not getting paid for it. It's like child slave labor. That's.

So you guys have obviously been entrepreneurial from a young age. When did you start Laps? What was kind of the idea behind it? Yeah, so Laps actually kind of, I guess the idea from Laps came from I was traveling in Vietnam in 2019 with a really good friend of mine called Tim and he kind of realized that I was in, you know, one of the most beautiful places in the world and I wasn't taking any photos. And he was like, this is really strange. What are you doing? And it's because I'd actually tried taking some photos in the first couple of days and I was like, just not doing this place any justice. I found myself like living through my phone rather than actually just enjoying the moment. And he's obsessed with these point and shoot film cameras and so he gave me one and he was like, just take photos on this and just see how you find it. And it kind of just made me fall in love with taking photos. Like I ended up shooting a whole bunch of photos that I just never would have shot otherwise. The experience of actually being fully in the moment and then getting that amazing reveal at the end when you develop your photos was just a really special experience. And there's a lot of stuff from that film experience that just doesn't exist in modern photography anymore. And that was kind of just kind of kickstarted this obsession which I was hounding Dan about. And he's just like, I think that was probably one of the most amazing things when you said I'm going to come on board as a co-founder. And I think that's just a really special thing, especially as the creative side of the brothers. Having the serious consultant side being like this is a good idea.

How do you guys find working together? Being brothers is one thing, but can you turn it off when you're then co-founders or how does it work? I think it gives us the ability to have a lot more kind of open debates, but also have like an underlying level of trust that you may not necessarily have if you don't have that family bond. Because I think ultimately we know obviously the most important thing is our family relationship and you know, nothing comes above that. But that also provides then the platform for us actually to be able to, because we do have very different viewpoints and, and ways of thinking, which is a complementary thing. But also obviously gives rise some time to some heated product debate.

How do you guys divide the workload? You maybe are more creative, you're on the business side of things. What does that look like on a practical level? It kind of varies. So I guess you could broadly say kind of the quantitative and data side lies with me and then the kind of qualitative vision and more design side lives with Ben. But in reality the kind of two are very intermingled. It's like kind of the art and the science and you need the two together to build particularly the kind of product that we're building.

What has been the process like from that, you know, initial idea when you were traveling, you realized like, we need somewhere to share these sorts of photos or to take these sorts of photos from that initial idea to now having a full-fledged company around it. Can you walk me through what that process looked like? Yeah, I mean, I think actually probably one of the interesting things about because it starts as a camera app, but I think there's an underlying realization that actually if you look at our relationship with social media, probably over the last five years, it's really evolved. It's kind of changed from participants to now we're spectators. And I think you start to see in the design of all these platforms, they kind of end up all being the same thing. It's like a vertical, never-ending scrolling feed of videos. And I think there's this shift where we're now consuming more than ever. But actually, even though the tools to create are easier than ever, there's now just more pressure than ever for that content to perform. And I think that's stopped a whole lot of people taking photos. But I think worse, it's actually created this sort of epidemic of anxiety and depression in young people. And so I think there's been this baseline of knowing this is kind of what the industry is like and there needs to be a change. And this idea of actually just changing the way that people capture and removing that pressure, inspired by film photography, could actually be the baseline for creating a new social network.

Definitely. And then from the business side of things, turning that ethos into then a company. How did you go about doing that? Yeah, it's interesting because we're both driven by very kind of different motivations. So, you know, Ben is obviously very on the kind of passion side and kind of lives and breathes the kind of purpose of the product. And for me, I get my joy from building large businesses and I started my career as a consultant when I started then a bootstrap business which we exited and then we started working together. So for me, the kind of common thread through all of that has been a passion for building agnostic of the industry. And again, I think that actually works to serve and serve to create a really healthy tension in the way that we think about product decisions. Because a lot of the time you have to think about the user versus the network. Because often it's very easy to say we always build for the user, but actually sometimes what's best for the user is to prioritize the network for a specific decision, which actually then for instance allows users to have more friends on the network, which then benefits the user in turn. And that kind of decision making we get from that kind of complementary way of thinking.

What exactly do you guys offer today and how does that differ from when you kind of first started out? I mean, any business changes so much over a couple months time span, let alone like a couple of years. So can you walk me through. Yeah. What it looks like right now and what it used to look like? Yeah, I mean for us, iterating very quickly is kind of at the heart of what we do. We do about three to four product releases, so new app updates every single week. So super, super fast iterations and a lot is changing. We're working on some really, really exciting things at the moment. We can't go into too much detail, obviously, given the nature of the industry and just how prevalent kind of copying is in the industry. But to give you an example of what's changed maybe even over the last 12 months, the kind of feed and the consumption surface for how users consume content from their friends has changed two or three times and improved the way people capture a new capture mode. So video, for instance, is rolling out as we speak. A new mode called burst mode, where you can take a series of kind of still photos that then get animated together, has also come out. Yeah, that's actually not in the last 12 months. That's probably the last kind of two months.

Yeah. And I think actually in the very beginning, the version of the app was essentially kind of like a group disposable camera. So the idea was you would basically all be on the same roll of film, you'd all shoot, and then the next morning all these snaps would develop and you'd have that kind of hangover style moment. And what we realized was we launched it, everybody loved the idea, but actually the most frequent users were actually using it in a very different way. They were using it to journal their everyday life. So they were using it not at parties and not sort of events that we expected it to be used at. They were using it in kind of like everyday, small little moments. And so we basically kind of in stealth transformed the product, took all the best bits that was working from version one of Laps, and we built a sort of secret product called Journa, which is now what Laps is.

So going through those different iterations, like you speak of kind of listening to what your users want out of the platform, how much do you listen to them versus stay true to what you guys set out to build from the get-go. What does that conversation look like? Yeah, I mean, I think it changes all the time and I think it's. I think that's part of the art. And also the difficulty of this business is understanding when user feed. Because I think the thing is a lot of people are really good at expressing their problems, but not necessarily the solutions. And that's our job, is to come up with the solutions to the problems. And it's trying to sort of sift between, you know, what people are saying and actually what people are feeling. And that, you know, really, really depends depending on what the thing is we're updating, what the thing is we're changing. Yeah. I also think particularly in consumer, and then particularly in high frequency consumer meaning kind of daily use cases, everyone has an opinion because it's so tangible and so our parents will have an opinion, our friends have opinions. Users will constantly be sending in their own opinions. And you've got to kind of filter through all of the noise and kind of stay aligned to what we believe drives the best value for users and then focus on that.

And sometimes that does align with what users are asking for and sometimes it doesn't directly correlate right in those three to six iterations in very short periods of time. Like you're saying, what are you exactly iterating on? What's something that you feel like you are constantly having to innovate on or change or just take a second look at? I guess probably what you just raised there, Dan, was actually something I think we didn't appreciate. It's going into building consumer social media was the frequency of the product matters a lot. Again, as I said in the very early version of the app, we were building essentially for events that happen maybe once a week, once every two weeks.

And if you're trying to build an app that becomes an integral part of someone's life that just isn't frequent enough, people just kind of forget. Especially because what we're going for is a replacement to the camera. We're trying to rebuild that habit of you going to the Apple camera or you going to another camera and, and change that to be I'm going to take this on laps. And the requirement of that is you just need to have really high frequency, you know, so you are top of mind for when someone goes to take a picture.

You mentioned too that the users that you are now seeing a lot on the platform are people who are using it in their day to day lives, not necessarily like the user that you thought initially. What does the demographic of users look like today? Is there an age, is there a region who is really on Laps right now? Yeah, there's a strong bias towards Gen Z and a strong bias towards females, which is actually really exciting for us because I think if you look at most of the large staple social platforms, the early adopter cohort was young females at the time. The other really exciting thing we're seeing is that a third of those users are actually taking more photos on Laps than they are on their native camera. From the kind of research and surveys that we've done, which have I think really exciting because it shows that we're actually becoming the default camera for that generation.

How do you think Gen Z has changed social media? I mean there have been so many changes with the young generation. But what are you guys seeing as the most prominent differences? Oh yeah, I think you kind of see this bifurcation between the social side and the media side, the video platforms, and the platforms which are putting a heavier emphasis on video. And when I say video, I mean more kind of like creator led video rather than just moving image. It's kind of more becoming entertainment and the kind of media side, but less social and particularly less friends focused. And then on the kind of friends and social side, you're seeing people wanting more authenticity. So rather than kind of what we had previously, which was the kind of intermingling of media and social in this kind of wrapped up, curated aspect, you're seeing creators take the kind of entertainment and consumption side, but then conversely a desire for more authenticity at the social end.

What do you think authenticity means, like, in practice? Because I think it's like such a buzzword that's thrown around and brands say it and creators say it and celebrities say it. And in a lot of ways it's like, well, that's not really. You can't be authentic if you're talking about it too much, you know what I mean? So in your eyes, what does that mean? How does it kind of manifest on somewhere like Laps? Yeah, I think for me, authenticity is actually kind of embedded in the culture of the app. I think if you think about the way people share, a lot of it is to do with the audience and audiences in traditional social networks have ballooned and because it's, you know, they're slowly shifting to be more creator dominated. And so with that, the pressure goes up and then suddenly everything feels like it needs to be way more curated.

And what's happened is, as Dan was saying, the kind of more social side of just friends content, more casual sharing has kind of got squeezed out. And this is the thing that I kind of think about a lot is we were kind of lucky and we kind of got the glory days of social media where it's like we had MySpace and Bebo and I'm showing my age now. But you know, all these social networks where it was like, it's genuinely a really fun common space where you'd log on and your friends were there and that has gone and actually has not been experienced by a lot of Gen Z because all they're used to is TikTok and other apps that are basically just trying to replicate that same experience. And so that's the really exciting thing for us is I think there's that space which is not currently served by anyone.

There's so much that's changed in the social media space, in the creative space over the last couple of years. Is there anything that you guys expect to change within the next couple of months or years that you're really prepared to kind of get ahead of the curve on? So I wonder if the question, and the question there is around how AI is changing things, because we're often asked about, how are you incorporating or looking at AI in Laps? And actually our answer to that is maybe quite surprising because we actually think we're moving in an orthogonal direction to generative AI. And that ties into the authenticity point that I was making earlier, because as more and more generative AI content makes its way onto social networks, we're actually a space where everything you see on Laps has been captured on Laps, has not been edited, and is genuinely proof of reality of what that person is doing. And so I think, as you can trust less and less what you see on other platforms, we're actually really proud and excited that Laps remains an area where you know that what you see is something that actually happens.

How are you guys going about retaining your users? Because I think that there have been a lot of social platforms in the past couple of years that kind of had the same ethos of being really real, being really in the moment, and then kind of fell off and people just stopped using them. How are you guys preventing that from happening? Yeah, I think the main thing is just how do we create value for users? I think if you can create value for users and back to our point about frequency on a daily basis, that's how you retain users. And I think if we stay laser focused, and we have been incredibly focused since our fundraiser a year ago, specifically on retention, we've very purposely been like, we don't want to grow right now. And what we want to do is focus on, because it's very easy to sort of run away with growth. And it actually masks a lot of the underlying problems in the network. And I think it's something that it's a very easy trap to fall into. And we have to be quite strict with ourselves of being like, actually it's really important we focus on making sure the underlying mechanics of the network work before we start to grow.

And I say the interesting dynamics of our business model and actually those in social generally are that your biggest costs are actually not your people or fixed overheads. It's actually the server cost, which is incredibly variable cost, obviously, based on user base. And so growing too quickly before you are ready there and there with retention is actually the fastest way to run out of money. And so you need to basically balance the kind of cash you have available because a lot of these platforms obviously don't monetize until a lot later, but with the right time to kind of start growing and kind of grow again so that you don't exhaust all of your cash in the pursuit of growth and actually forget to realize that if you look at cohort levels from the earlier cohorts, you're actually losing those users.

Yeah. Are you guys monetizing right now? We're not and it's not something that's on the roadmap for a while. For us the full focus is on user retention and creating an amazing product for, for those users. And I think that's a really common thread through like consumer products and consumer social. But it has been a really tough past couple of years, especially for like funding into consumer products. What have your guys experiences been like as this market has fluctuated? How are you kind of like, you know, continuing to move forward knowing that a lot of the market is not succeeding right now? Yeah, I think we're in quite an interesting space. So our last fundraise was about a year ago now and I think somewhat bucked the trend, particularly for companies that are not in the AI space and are really not touching AI on the kind of front-end.

And I think it's because the opportunity within consumer social is so large. If you look at all of the biggest Internet companies, they're all consumer-focused and actually many of them are social media. And so I think that for us has proven that to be an amazing platform to kind of raise from and has allowed us basically to do fundraisers that definitely wouldn't be impossible in any other sectors probably.

Aside from AI, how are you guys attracting new users today? What's your marketing strategy? How are you reaching these young girls and other users of the platform today? It's 100% organic. So about half of our signups come from word of mouth and spread and then half of them come from people inviting through the app itself. Like we said, there's I think a lot of apps out there that are overspending in a dangerous way that they probably haven't quite yet realized and kind of spending money potentially before the product is ready. Definitely. From the creative side of things, how is everything from the visuals to the types of content that's curated on the platform to how you are sharing news about it with potential users. How is it different from what else exists today? That's a really good question.

I think a big part of it is actually leaning into why we're different. I think it was really interesting. In one of our, I think it was one of our seed investment rounds, we had a message and it was like the thing I love about it, it just feels so different to what currently exists. And that's from the aesthetic, from the branding. We're actually moving very much away from kind of the Silicon Valley style product, which I think a lot of products look like now. And we're leaning more into this kind of slightly analog, slightly more kind of inspired by real film. And that takes place in the UI, takes place in the marketing. And it's something that I think we need to constantly look at every single touchpoint of what we're building and making sure that kind of feels cohesive.

And there's something like nostalgic about it. Correct. And I think that's something that a lot of young people today are really tapping into. I mean, everything from, like, fashion trends to other sorts of photo apps and things like that. How much are you leaning into, like, what's old versus what's new? Totally, totally. And I think that's what's so fascinating is it was also, if you think about film, it's actually nostalgia for a time that we didn't really necessarily live through. Like, I didn't use a film camera when I was younger. I used it, you know, fairly recently. And I think it says a lot about how visual styling culture can create these counter movements. And I think this is again, why I think, you know, we've been so successful is we've kind of capitalized off the fact that everyone's phones create a very certain type of image that is essentially dictated by Apple. And people are now getting a bit fed up with that because it's become associated with this, like, era of hyper control on Instagram. And like, everything is perfect.

And so people are kind of rebelling against that. And that is, I think, why the film aesthetic is kind of so popular at the moment. My last question for you guys, what is next for you guys? The company with regards to, like, how much is changing in the space like we've been talking about, AI is coming into play. Social media changes, like, by the minute. What's next for Laps? What's next is what the kind of priority has always been, which is building the best possible product for users, staying laser, laser focused on that, and continuing to iterate and build an amazing product. And how about from the creative side of things? Anything you're excited about? I think the thing is, well, the thing that has always driven Laps is how do we make people fall back in love with taking photos. And for me, it's just keeping chipping away on that goal and becoming the go-to camera for a lot of people. Yeah, I love it. Well, thank you both so much for taking the time to. Thank you. Alex, chat with me today.

TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, SOCIAL MEDIA, PHOTOGRAPHY, GEN Z, FORBES