What motivated you to get started with Banana?Īt first we just wanted to explore WebRTC, a technology for peer-to-peer communication. We shipped in late January/early February 2017, and it has already acquired almost 200,000 users with zero marketing in less than a year. I would work as a web developer for the four following years before finally embarking on my entrepreneurial adventure.īanana is a random video chat app for gay men on Android and iOS. I sent out my resume to all the Ruby shops in NYC, and all but one web agency rejected me. After four months of part-time web development (this was before coding bootcamps existed) and after asking hundreds of questions on StackOverflow, I mustered up the courage to apply for jobs as a developer. At the time I had no idea what I was going to do, and it was Aaron who convinced me to learn programming at General Assembly.Įveryone around me thought I was nuts for going to school again right after I'd graduated.
I originally studied economics at Syracuse University and was eventually laid off from an administrative job that I hated (and honestly sucked at) at a real estate company. My partner Aaron Vasquez and I have several internet businesses, with Banana being one of our first and most interesting. Hi! My name is Edmund Mai, and I'm the co-founder of Potato Labs, a hybrid incubator/software consulting company. Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?
