Locket - Blog

We are excited to share the news that Locket has been selected as one of the “Best Apps of 2014” by Google!

We want to thank you all for your suggestions to make today’s Locket. We are excited to continue making your lock screen even cooler!

As always, please send any feedback or suggestions to [email protected].

Thank you!

With today's release we are incredibly excited to announce a couple awesome features!

In addition to dramatically improving the app's stability, we have two awesome features that you will significantly improve your experience.

Like From The Lock Screen:

One of our most frequent requests from users was:  they saw an article they found really interesting and wanted to read, but had to quickly unlock their phone. Rather than waiting for it to come up again or trying to find it in the feed, you now have the ability to:

Press our new and improved slider button

enjoy our fresh, new animation

and swipe up to the "like" this piece of content.

This will save everything that you "like" into your Likes folder within the app.

From here you can read through everything you didn't have time to engage with. You can now peruse through all your favorite content within this feed, just one touch away from sharing with your friends.

Multiple Lock Screens:

Even more exciting is the Multiple Lock Screen functionality in this version.

When you wake up your phone, simply swipe from right to left and you will see an additional lock screen appear:

keep swiping

    your 2nd screen has arrived.

You can continue swiping from right to left, to view up to five pieces of content without locking then waking up your phone.

almost there!

During our pay-per-swipe days, many of our big-hearted users suggested we provide an option for them to donate their earnings to a worthwhile cause. After crowdsourcing many deserving causes, we tallied up the votes and the recipient was chosen. 

Free Arts For Abused Children is a Los Angeles based charity that understands and appreciates the inherent therapeutic value of the arts. Through its programs, it inspires hope in the lives of children who have experienced abuse, neglect, poverty and homelessness through innovative creative arts programs and positive interactions with caring adult volunteers.

Today we are incredibly proud to announce that donations through the generosity of our incredible user base have totaled over $10,000. We look forward to presenting the total donation to Free Arts of Abused Children this week.

Though our pay-per-swipe days are in the past, the legacy of our Locket Beta testers will live on in the lives of the children receiving this gift.

We’d like to thank all of our users once again for supporting this cause and look forward to updating you on this gifts impact in the future!

-Team Locket

As mentioned in our previous blog post, we've partnered with Gyft to provide a new way to redeem your remaining Locket balance.

Your balance will transfer in its entirety to a gift card of your choice, from any of the premier companies that are listed - including Amazon, Whole Foods, Nike and many others. 

[Note: most gift cards are denominated in whole numbers, so you may need to top off your balance to make it round. For example, if your balance is $7 you may need to top it off with $3 to redeem a $10 Amazon gift card.]

Below are detailed instructions to make the transition as seamless as possible.

Step 1: Update and open up the latest Locket App, and you will be taken to The Feed. 

Step 2: Hit the Locket logo in the top left corner to bring out the drawer. You will see Settings at the bottom - click this to go to the next screen.

Step 3: Select "Locket Rewards" underneath your email address.

Step 4: First, copy your Gyft Code by pressing the green button at the bottom of the screen. Next, hit "Redeem Now" to be taken to the Gyft mobile site.

Step 5: Once on the Gyft website, scroll to the bottom of the page and select "Get Started Now."

Step 6: Create an account using Facebook, Google, Twitter or Email address.

Step 7: Once logged in, you will be at your Web Wallet. To redeem you code click the drop-down menu in the top right corner.

Next, select your name to drop down another menu, then click "Claim Gyft Code"

Step 8: Enter your Gyft Code, and you will see your balance appear. The only thing left to do is then select the gift card of your choice and do a little bit of shopping!

For any issues on redeeming your balance through Gyft website, please reach out to [email protected] or call 650-319-7478. For any other issues inside Locket app, please reach out to [email protected].

Thank you again for all your support!

Dear Locket users,

For those of you that signed up to earn cash, I’m regretful that we had to discontinue the pay-per-swipe service as of January 1st, 2014. We are now offering gift card options to redeem your remaining balance. The option is available inside the Locket app.

Below is an in-depth account of why we had to change and how you can cash out your balances.

The New Locket

Last fall, we did a poor job explaining why we stopped our pay-per-swipe service. I thought I’d take some time to explain our decision, and lay out our vision for the new Locket.

Inspiration & Inception

In March 2013, my cofounders and I started Locket because we were inspired by how often people check their phone (over 100 times per day). Your lock screen is boring, and we believe it deserves better than a static picture of a flower.

We quit our jobs, moved into a small apartment, slept on Ikea bunk beds, ate ramen for four months, and worked around the clock to make the idea real.

In July 2013, we launched a beta version of Locket that displayed beautiful, print quality ads on your lock screen and paid you to unlock your phone. People loved it. The beta version got more attention than we ever could have imagined. Hundreds of thousands of users installed our app, consuming millions of ad impressions every day. Brand advertisers were calling us!

However, we realized quickly that the economics of the business model weren’t working as planned. We were unable to generate enough advertising revenue fast enough to cover our user payout. At one point, we were paying out of our own pockets to sustain the model. We were bleeding cash.

Four Basic Problems with our Model

1. Chicken-and-eggonomics problems: Although we enjoyed early success building an audience, we struggled to bring in high profile advertisers quickly enough (to pay our audience). Our ad unit was unique and required a lot of evangelism. And since the lock screen is a personal and sacred space, we were very selective of our advertisers - which slowed us down even more. From dawn to dusk, we raced to sell ads, but the future wasn’t any brighter.

2. Cash Flow: Sales cycles took at least 2-3 months and advertisers would pay us another 2-3 months after we delivered on their campaigns. Since we pay users first and get paid from advertisers later, we were burning through a lot of cash quickly.

3. Adverse Selection: In order to sustain the business, we had to either lower the user payouts or the quality of ads, both of which would attract the kind of users that repelled advertisers.

4. Low user loyalty: We also learned that users would leave immediately if a competitor were to offer a bigger payout. Yet, they were costly to keep, as they were the most vocal and angry with any change we had to make to the model.

What We Did

Given these lessons, we finally made the very difficult decision to stop our own pay-per-swipe service and admit that this business model did not work for us.

The transition has been challenging: We disappointed a lot of our users and subsequently our app ratings in the Google Play Store plummeted. Perhaps most painfully, we had to downsize our team by half and part ways with some of our beloved team members.

What's Next

Despite the challenges, we are more passionate and committed to the idea of creating value on your lock screen than ever. These days, we’re experimenting with contextual content you care about based on your personal interests, swiping habits, and time of the day.

Since we made the shift, we've signed on content providers like HuffPost, TechCrunch and TMZ. I learned about the missing Malaysian Airplane through my lock screen and daily tips delivered to my lock screen continue to inspire me every day. Our user engagement and retention rates are higher than ever. We are excited to find value in contextual content on your lock screen.

Thanks to all of you for your support. If you would like to continue this journey with us and support our vision, please try out the latest Locket.

This blog post was originally posted on Yunha's Medium

What is it like to be a female in tech?

I think the industry is really curious about this topic — almost so much so that we appear committed to proving how different (or perhaps difficult) it is to be a female CEO.

If a reporter asks me why it sucks to be a female CEO, I can come up with hundreds of reasons. On the other hand, if I am asked to argue why it’s awesome to be a female CEO, I can also do that pretty well. So here is my take on both sides.

Top 3 reasons it sucks to be a female CEO

If you are aggressive, you are a bitch. If you are emotional, you are PMSing. If you are soft, you are too feminine. Whatever way someone finds you, they can always justify it is because you are female.

You may get more sales meetings because some of the guys that you are pitching to have a different agenda. Since it’s difficult to distinguish it early on, you may end up wasting some time. If you turn down their advances (and it gets awkward), doing deals with their companies can become difficult.

Hiring engineers can get tricky. When you reach out to prospective developers, you may get emails like this:

And the sad news is, this is one of the more professional emails.

Top 3 reasons it is awesome to be a female CEO

Sometimes, guys are more willing to help you because you are a girl. On the flip side, girls will help you because you are a "fellow female entrepreneur". This is one of the rarely spoken benefits of being a female CEO, especially when you are trying to get things off the ground.

Fundraising can be easier. For instance, there are female investors whose personal goal is to empower other female entrepreneurs. When Tyra invested in Locket, I felt lucky to be a female CEO.

You might be able to hire more talented female employees. You understand them better so it can be easier to identify a good fit. And if you land on the right ones, they can be really good (e.g. our designer Lisa is the best). After all, there are bunch of studies (done by female organizations, obvi) that show women perform better on the job.

Tyra sent me this T-shirt to celebrate her investment in Locket.

The lesson here is that it is all about how you frame your perspective. If you are committed to believing that it sucks to be a female CEO, you will be right, and it will suck to be you. If you are committed to believing it’s awesome to be a female CEO, you will be happier and confident to be you.

After all, it’s not like you can choose whether to be a female CEO vs male CEO. But you can choose your attitude toward it.

Want to see your story on Locket? Tweet your story @getlocket and we will feature you on our lock screens.

Now with Locket, you can get an inside look into a life of a celebrity without unlocking your phone.

Open Locket and follow @christinamilian and follow her life as a singer, actress, and mother right from the lock screen. If you have an outdated version of Locket, get the update here.

Thank you loyal Locket users - we’ll continue to innovate the lock screens for you!

We have listened to your valuable feedback and used it to help Locket grow to become the best lock screen out there!. The team has been working hard day and night to provide a more diverse variety of content and features. We are also happy to announce that we are now available internationally!

If you haven’t updated, come check out what’s new here. We've recently introduced Locket Cast. It is an innovative content platform that brings you your favorite content directly to the lock screen. Whether you enjoy catching up on the latest news or watching some LOL-worthy Vine videos, Locket has you covered.

You’ll soon be able to cast your content to lock screens worldwide. Signing up to cast is by invite only for now but we are working to open it up to the public soon. You can also invite friends by Facebook, Twitter or email and follow each other for an added social experience.

As always, thanks for using Locket. Please feel free to contact us for any comments or suggestions. Happy swiping!

After seeing a lot of our users enjoying the My Gallery feature, we’re making Locket even more customizable and more exciting. We’re happy and proud to announce the newest idea - Locket Cast!

Locket Cast is designed for all of you content curators and opinion makers out there - share your content with a huge base of followers right at a glance. If you follow tech news, daily news, memes or random funny stuff, why not share it around the Locket network? It’s an opportunity to be featured on lock screens across the country.

Locket users benefit from even more interesting stuff and a new content discovery platform - Locket Cast. Users will be able to choose their favorite casters, rate and hide the content shown and quickly have a personalized lock screen experience with so many features coming in the pipeline.

Dear Members of the Locket Community,

Locket started off as a simple idea – help people find real value on the lock screen.  After a lot of sleepless nights, we launched this summer and were humbled by the incredible amount of support and feedback from awesome members like yourself.

We’re a team of dreamers, but we’re small.  In our first few months, our team has been overwhelmed with support requests, legal challenges and a lot of checks to write.  And, we quickly fell into a classic chicken and egg situation: we couldn’t attract new advertisers without a significant user base, and we couldn’t afford to support a large user base without new advertisers (and revenue).

Although we still believe that getting paid to unlock our phones is a brilliant idea and we’ve already paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to our users in our first few months, we’re recognizing that we’re simply not going to generate advertising dollars fast enough to sustain our original ‘pay per swipe’ business model.

We understand your frustration, and we’re sorry.  Reading through your complaints, it’s clear that we’ve disappointed a number of you, who installed our app with an expectation of earning cash.  We have learned that we simply cannot support this anymore.

Instead, we’re refocusing our efforts in delivering value to your lock screen with contextual content, and making sure that you’ll see engaging and useful content (ranging from inspiring quotes, funny videos, and pretty pictures to sports scores, news and stock prices) every hour, every day.

Please feel free to reach out to us and provide your feedback on this, as (always) your opinion really matters to us.

Locket is growing up, we’re introducing some big changes to the app and making the lock screen experience fit you and your needs.

We’ve always delivered beautiful, tailor-made content to your lock screen and recently introduced a bunch of new features with some more waiting to be rolled out. We already started with 500px photos, weather information and quotes [thanks for the awesome feedback on those, btw!]

Now, we’re super happy to announce My Gallery - a chance to customize your lock screen just the way you want it. At the time, you can choose up to 6 photos that will be  featured on your lock screen throughout the day. Choose your favorite Instagram shots, funny pet or family photos and make them easier to show around.

Never get bored of the same old lock screen again, Locket makes it exciting (:

Dear loyal Locket members,

Although overwhelmed with great changes going on in the company, I feel like I should take some time to explain this to you in a few sentences and thank you for your awesome feedback, suggestions and stories.

We said earlier we would have some upcoming changes with the newest Locket version. Today we’re excited to announce those changes.

We are transitioning away from paying per swipe. As hard as we've tried to make this model successful for our users, the economics were not working out. Check out our updated Terms of use for more information on this!

Instead of pay-per-swipe, we are working with our charity partners to allow our users to collectively make social impact. This is why we will be donating a majority of our advertising profits to charity. 

We will now be working with app developers, content providers and advertisers to deliver beautiful, useful, and relevant content on your lock screen.

Locket Studio will change how we interact with our phones. Customize your lock screen the way you want with your own album, inspiring photos from 500px, weather, news, shopping and much more!

Your Locket Dollars are now Locket Points. You’ll also now have more options to redeem your points including PayPal, charity, and gift cards (coming soon).

You’ll still be able to get rewarded with our Earn Rewards section. We’re working close with our partners to bring you better reward programs.

And much more to come! Please take some time to read the FAQ to be updated on all these exciting new changes.

These necessary changes will allow us to better serve the Locket community. You guys have shown us you want beautiful content on the lock screen and with the newest Locket, we’re going to bring it to you. We want every swipe to be a delight so please join us as we move Locket forward! We’re super excited about this, we couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out, and we hope you’ll love it, too.

Thanks for being awesome beta testers!

When we started Locket we knew we were on to something. We knew the lock screen was important and we knew we could use Locket to help people.

With this in mind we’re super excited to announce our newest version of Locket. We know you love the beautiful content Locket brings to your lock screen. Now we’re going to re-imagine the way you interact with your apps.

We've been working really hard on this to take Locket to the next level and we’re so happy with the way it’s turned out. We couldn't be more excited and we know you’ll feel the same.

Current Locket members will still keep their account balances. All members will continue to be rewarded in new and better ways. We can’t wait to show you what we've got, we absolutely love it, and we know you will too.

Happy Swiping,

We’re thrilled to announce that Tyra Banks and her investment firm, Fierce Capital, have invested in Locket. We’re excited for the opportunity to work with such an influential figure in the entertainment business. Please welcome Tyra to the Locket family!

Last week Locket was invited to attend GMIC - The Global Mobile Internet Conference in San Francisco.  With a lot of interesting keynotes, great networking opportunities and awesome events, the conference was a huge success.

We had an opportunity to have a demo exhibition booth in the AppAttack competition where we presented our app to other developers, potential partners and advertisers and some great new startups changing the mobile industry.

We are very excited to announce that we won the AppAttack competition! This reinforces our belief that we are truly doing something revolutionary with the mobile advertising space. Not to mention we can now add “award-winning” to our pitches :)