I grew up chatting online - shout-out to those who can still remember their ICQ number. But as someone who chats constantly with friends all around the world, I’m continually annoyed at the current state of chat apps. Among my many concerns, the main problem is that each app has its own private network. Because of that, I’m forced to switch between 5+ different apps every day to chat with all my friends. I simply want to chat, without needing to memorize which app each person is on.

This led me to start Beeper. At Beeper, we are building the best chat app on Earth. Yes, this is an audacious goal, but we’re excited, energized and confident we can do it.

What makes the best chat app on Earth? For us, this is what we believe in:

Chat with anyone on Earth from one app

You should never have to remember which chat app your friend uses. Or spend your day switching between different chat apps on your phone. Also, It shouldn’t matter which type of phone you have (iMessage 🤨). Tap in your friend’s name and instantly start chatting with them. That’s it.

Secure and trustworthy

Our chats can be deeply personal and private. You must be able to trust the people who make your chat app. At Beeper, our primary objective is to earn and keep your trust. We do this by using zero-access encryption on all messages stored on Beeper (more here), end-to-end-encryption between Beeper users and open-sourcing as much of our codebase as possible (Github). Unlike the other big chat apps (iMessage, WhatsApp and Messenger), we’re proud to have a transparent business model that is aligned with the interests of our users. In short - we’re not an ad network trying to harvest your data, or a hardware company trying to lock you into their ecosystem.

Fast and fun

If you're anything like me, you likely pick up your phone dozens of times a day to chat. We're building Beeper to be superfast and delightfully fun to use. To be honest, chatting with friends is one of the few activities on the internet that truly makes me smile. We’re going to keep it that way. We will not allow chat to become the spammy, transactional mess that email is today. Everything about Beeper helps focus you on the people you care about, and tune out the noise.

Sync to any device

I love chatting on my phone, but find myself in front of a laptop most of the workday. I want my chats to be synced on any device I happen to be using at the time. Most chat apps have terrible desktop clients. We’re fixing that.

One size doesn't fit all

Over 3 billion people chat every day using apps that all look pretty much the same. Where is the creativity and ingenuity? One of my favourite things we created at Pebble (my first startup) was the vibrant developer ecosystem that sprung up around our smartwatch. It seemed like every day there was a new app, or hack that someone had built. It was exciting! We’re planning to do the same with Beeper. Expect Beeper to improve rapidly, both from updates we publish, and from the developer ecosystem around Beeper and the Matrix open source chat protocol on which Beeper is based.

All this wouldn’t be necessary if all 8 billion people on Earth decided to standardize and use the same chat app. But clearly this is not going to magically happen by itself. So, we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands and build an app that fixes all these problems with chat.

I love working on these problems because we all spend an incredibly large portion of our day chatting. If Beeper can improve the experience each time you chat by just a little bit, our efforts will soon be felt billions of times per day.

We're just getting started. I’m excited for you to try out Beeper and let us know what you think of it. We want to chat with you, let us know what you think of our plan and give us feedback 😃

Sign up for Beeper today.

Eric Migicovsky

Co-founder and CEO