Here's how DJ Khaled could manage his Snapchat Stories AND his Instagram Stories
Snapchat's far from the only app with 24-hour Stories these days. Facebook released Instagram Stories, Messenger Day, WhatsApp Stories and Facebook Stories.
The struggle of which ten-second video to post and where to post it is so real (for celebrities, social media "influencers," and the rest of us garden-variety narcissists). That's why entrepreneurs Sebastian Dobrincu and Jordan Gonen created Storyheap, a platform for uploading stories to both Snapchat and Instagram, and visualizing analytics.
SEE ALSO: Facebook is rolling out yet another Stories feature — this time on your News Feed
The entrepreneurs were inspired, in part, by Facebook's big push in Snapchat-like features. "With Facebook involving so heavily in the stories market recently, we are sure that this is the new gold mine for influencers and brands to reach wider audiences. Stories are the new newsfeed," Dobrincu told me via Twitter DM.
Storyheap, launched out of stealth mode late last week, but it's still in beta, and offers the ability to schedule posts and see analytics. They plan to release it to a handful of influencers, and hope to attract some top talent such as DJ Khaled, YG and Gary Vaynerchuk, as pictured below:
Image: storyheap
Vaynerchuk isn't involved in the company or using the platform, yet. They still haven't settled on a price for the service. Justin Kan, cofounder of Justin.tv and Twitch.tv, suggested $100 per month in a video posted to the Whale app.
"I think this is a great idea. One of the things that I wanted was something that scanned my Snapchat Stories and post them to Instagram because I don't want to have to download them and post them myself," Kan said.
Storyheap is far from the only solution. Delmondo offers similar analytics for Snapchat, in particular. The platform now works as an official partner with Facebook for live video.
Storyheap's main and most-requested feature, according to Dobrincu, is called Autopilot. By turning it on with an online dashboard, creators are able to post their 10-second videos to both Snapchat and Instagram.
Creators must first take the video on Snapchat. If they do it the other way around, the video will appear as a Memory on Snapchat. "We are working on solutions around that," Dobrincu said.
Storyheap's dashboard also shows numbers of plays and views for each post as well as a user's total number of followers and growth (something that is not easily accessible on the Snapchat app itself).
How is this possible, especially given that Instagram and Snapchat don't have a publicly-available API? Dobrincu won't reveal the "special sauce," but emphasized that it's safe, and doesn't violate either company's terms of service.
"We'd like to be very clear that we are not violating either Snapchat's or Instagram's terms of service. We have our special sauce for interacting with their platform without causing any safety issues for our users," Dobrincu said. "Their account security is our top priority, and we are using official interfaces for interacting with their platforms."
For now, Storyheap just works for Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories, but the team has plans to expand to other platforms, with Facebook Stories and Messenger Day as top priorities.
"Storyheap aims not only to close the social stories gap, but our long-term plan is to create an interconnected environment for creators," he said. "Our mission is to make Storyheap creators’ centralized dashboard, from where they could handle their entire social media activity."
The business is completely self-funded, so far. Dobrincu said they are looking to raise a seed round in order to hire more developers.
