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Verse is a mobile-first creation platform where pages pulse to music and discovery works like a social feed – built around Gen Z's native creative habits.
ENTRY ANGLES
Extract a specific feature from an existing product and build a new product around it · Convert internal development tools into core products · Narrow a universal product to solve a specific problem for a defined audience
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Product pivot and repositioning expertise, Mobile-optimized content creation tools, Understanding of emerging content format trends
Verse is a platform for creating blogs, mini-sites, collages, and other expressive formats.
The concept is basically: what happens if you cross Pinterest with TikTok, or a no-code website builder with a social feed.
The baseline mechanic: create mobile-optimized pages where you can arrange text blocks, images, videos, and links in any order, apply colors freely, and set everything moving and pulsing to a music track you choose.
The app has a discovery feed showing the most interesting pages created by other users – filterable by topic: music, film, fashion, food, and so on.
You can also search for specific pages: "best ramen in Tokyo," "the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake," "people obsessed with NewJeans."
Each page can be shared externally via a unique link, with one-tap sharing to Instagram and X.
You can follow other creators and see their new pages in a dedicated section. Creators can track subscribers, views, and inbound referral links in a built-in analytics panel.
The pages themselves are visually intense – animated, music-driven, dense. Those who want a sense of the real thing can look at an example or two.
The app launched on the App Store in June, and over 200,000 pages have been created since. The founding team went through Y Combinator in winter 2022 – but with a different product.
The previous product was called Discz. It let users discover music suited to their mood and taste, build playlists and mixes, share them with friends, and discuss what everyone was listening to. It found an audience: 1.5 million users.
Discz let users create profiles – not boring, static bios, but expressive layouts mixing text, images, and tracks. The founders noticed something: users were spending as much time building their profiles as they were using the core music features.
That observation became Verse – a standalone product where self-expression is the whole point, not a side feature of something else.
The pivot echoes a famous story: the creation of Flickr. The team set out to build a game. The game didn't work, and they were nearly bankrupt. But inside the game, players could upload photos to their profiles – and the founder pulled that feature out and built it into something else entirely. That became Flickr.
The same founder, years later, tried to build another game. It also didn't work. But during development, the team had built an internal tool for exchanging messages and coordinating work across a distributed team. He extracted that tool and turned it into its own product. That became Slack.
That story, told in its full version by Stewart Butterfield in a conversation with LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, is worth tracking down.
Also interesting: a [review from 2022](/review/nezametnoe-izmenenie-na-mnogie-milliardy) covered Piggy, a very similar platform that could produce individual pages, full documents, and presentations. The founders even raised $7.7M in their first round by sending Piggy-built decks to investors.
Several months ago, Piggy pivoted – replacing the platform with KwaKwa, a tool for building short mobile courses. The underlying content engine appears to be the same; the use case got narrower and more defined.
That pivot pattern itself is instructive: a platform that lets you create "anything" with a given technology often eventually becomes a platform for creating one specific thing. The more specific product can be sold with a clearer value proposition and generates a more focused user acquisition story.
If your startup isn't working, don't suffer through it. Pivot.
And the pivot doesn't require a completely new idea:
- Pull out a specific feature from the old product and build a new product around it.
- Take an internal tool built during development and turn it into the core product.
- Trade universality for specificity – take the old product's engine and narrow it to a more specific problem for a more defined audience.
The less obvious version of that lesson: pivot even when things are going okay.
The goal isn't to build something that works well enough. It's to build something exceptional. "Works well enough" can usually be leveled up, but getting from "good" to "exceptional" often requires changing direction, not just trying harder.
Discz had respectable traction. The founders could have kept pushing the music app. Instead, they made a calculated bet that a new direction had more ceiling. That's the startup instinct: always asking whether there's a higher version of what you're building.
Returning to Verse itself – something about the idea clearly has resonance. It keeps appearing in different forms across multiple startups.
The underlying signal: the traditional content formats are aging out. Text articles, static images, conventional slideshows, talking-head videos – all increasingly feel dated, awkward to create, and poorly suited to mobile.
Short video and Stories exploded for a reason. But creating high-quality short video is still demanding and excludes a large share of potential creators. What comes next is likely platforms where AI generates the videos and animations based on user direction. The Verse founders have already mentioned AI assistance for page creation as something they're building toward.
The content format problem isn't limited to social or entertainment contexts. A [May review](/review/bojcovskij-klub-direktorov) covered Zeck, which raised $7.5M in its first round for a board meeting preparation platform. The core insight: replace the traditional slide deck with a content format optimized for quick comprehension on a mobile screen. Same problem, professional context.
So the general direction is building platforms for new content formats: more engaging, more concise, more mobile-native. And eventually VR-ready, when that hardware finally finds its moment.
Verse is clearly a first pass at something rather than the final form. But the direction is real. The question is which specific formats, for which specific use cases, with which specific tools – and the only way to find out is to run experiments, kill what doesn't work, and develop what does.
Universal platforms may not be the answer. Narrower vertical tools probably win, as Piggy's pivot toward courses and Zeck's focus on board meetings both suggest.
The test for any specific domain: find content people currently find boring or cumbersome to consume, and ask whether a more visual, interactive format would improve comprehension without adding production burden.
Either way: if you're building a popular startup, you're building for people who are young today. That means new content formats aren't optional – they're the medium your future users live in, regardless of the space you're building for.