10 Things You Didn’t Know About Prose.

1. Prose. was conceived during the queen mother of all hangovers by a resident author while he was sweating alcohol, sick on the floor of the Austin, Texas, convention center during SXSW 2014.

2. The Challenges feature was a source of consternation and violent text wars from Prose.’s creator to the development and business team, after the coder sent the resident author only the wire frame for Challenges, and the author thought it was the newsfeed, and he pulled over en route to Seattle and the war became bloodier while semis on Interstate 5 shook the author’s station wagon, which was basically held together by dirt and faith at that point. As the bigger picture was made clear to him, the author, known and usually hated for his bad temper, texted back his deepest apologies, but shit was still tense for a day or so.

3. During the first physical meeting between the author and the coder and the coder’s partner in the development company of the app, the three of them talked for three hours at Essentials Bakery by Gas Works Park, and the conversation became so high-energy that surrounding tables started listening, until the coder drove away a family of four with excited, constant foul language he was unable to control. The hurt look on the father’s face while he hustled off his wife and two small children made the author laugh until he started coughing.

4. The coder worked alone, and obsessed with the app until beta was launched only two months after concept.

5. The Prose. Facebook page had 100 likes per day for the first week, before anyone even knew what it was.

6. The ink splotch beneath the period after Prose. was initially placed beneath the top of the P, until it was moved on a whim at the office while the author and the coder and a few other people stared at it. Some people confused it with a bullet hole graphic, which the team decided could be worse, because what punctuates anything more prominently than a bullet?

7. During beta testing, the core group was only supposed to invite a few people each with the Testflight link via email, but none of them listened, or else none of their friends listened, and the 38 testers for beta became 128 within two weeks. Nobody has yet owned responsibility for this.

8. Prose. launched publicly on iOS the last week of September, 2014, and then launched the .com toward the end of the following November—from the iOS launch until the spring of 2015, aside from the popular social media pages, the news of the app pretty much spread by word of mouth.

9. The first country outside of the States to have a Prose. writer was Canada, and a writer from the UK was the first Proser from a non-contiguous country.

10. Since the app’s launch, the word "prose" has become an acceptable verb across the globe.

__________________________

You can view the fully-loaded version of this article on the Prose blog at: blog.theprose.com/blog