Harker Aquila interviewed Misha Leybovich, the CEO and co-founder of Trio. Trio was released on iOS devices at the beginning of March and allows users to create mashup clips of videos, photos, music, and animated GIFs. Supporting imports from Vine, Instagram, and Giphy, Trio aims to serve as both a media mashup creator and as a new form of social media.

Harker Aquila: How long have you been working on Trio, and has the vision of the app changed during the creative and developmental process?

Misha Leybovich: Sure, so on the app itself, we’ve been working for about a year. And during that time, kind of to answer your second question at the same time, I think yeah we’ve changed quite a lot during that time. This is probably our third or fourth major iteration within that process. You know, at a high level, it’s a simple concept. You use other people’s stuff to make videos. But, there’s all kinds of details in the way. […] Creating a mobile experience is about putting the constraints in the right places to make it easy to use and […] to still produce content that is actually interesting. So we played around with several concepts around the way and we ended up with Trio. So we worked on the product for about a year, and the company has been around for around three years, this is our third major project.

HA: How did you come up with the name Trio?

ML: We think the whole remixing third party content with your friends is a new form of expression. So there’s some kind of creativity that is solo, you know, you’re by yourself and you’re drawing something. There’s some kind of creativity that is duo, where it’s your friends, and your messaging, or maybe it’s social media and you’re going back and forth. And then, we presented a new social media that is a trio, with you, your friend, and basically the rest of the world. All of these different kinds of assets that can come into your creativity, and its you, your friends, and all that original content is attached to other people, so they become a part of your process. So its a new form of creativity that we don’t think has really existed before.

HA: Do you consider Trio as more of a video-mashup app where users can take content from all over the world and mash it up together, or more of a new kind of social media through remixing this kind of content.

ML: I think it’s kind of both, I think it’s social media through remixing. I mean, you take any social media app, you need to have some kind of activity, something the users can do and create. I think that mashing up is the activity that people do. I think that there are a lot of social things that people can do within Trio. They can engage with other people, they can follow each other, and it’s very similar to Instagram and Vine how you follow other people. In creating the app we needed to keep in mind that ultimately we want people to spend more time in the app and remain engaged, we have to recognize that this is a beginning, that we are starting from an audience of nothing and we need to grow it. It has to be a useful tool to begin with, where even if you are the only one of your friends on Trio right now you can still make content and publish it on other places and still get social feedback, so it has to be good enough to do that. But I think that ultimately people will find more and more value spending time in the app and consuming content there and exchanging with people there. So I think it’s both, it’s a creation tool as well as social media.

HA: Are you going to be expanding to other phones like Android in the future, or are you moving into other devices from phones?

ML: Yeah, definitely. Definitely Android. You know the nature of doing a small startup is you need to make development tradeoffs. This is pretty common, you start with iPhone, and its the easiest to develop for and to get it out there, you have made something really good. And then, you build from Android as well. In fact, I don’t think there’s been a single consumer app that’s started on Android, that’s just the nature of it. That said, we hope to get there by the end of the year, because we know that there is a big audience there. Put it this way, Instagram released their Android version a week or two before they got bought by Facebook. So, you can get a long way just on iPhone, but we’ll get to Android as quick as we can since we know that’s important too.

HA: What’s been your favorite part of the process so far?

ML: You just get a thrill that this thing that we spent our time being creative about and this thing we create makes it possible to be creative themselves. I don’t know, maybe it sounds kind of cheesy but it’s just such a thrill. You see people and they’re funny and they’re creative and they get to look awesome to their friends, they get to exchange, and they get people to laugh. The fact that they do that using our tool is really rewarding. So I love that, and I love seeing the product come together on a personal level. I love seeing how me and my co-founder have gotten good at what we do. It’s taken a while, but the professional and personal development of finally learning how to make a good consumer app just takes a while. It’s great seeing your effort turning into a product that works out.

HA: Is there anything else you want to mention about Trio?

ML: Our email address is [email protected] and we want to hear from you guys, we always want to hear new feedback, new ideas, new complaints, new suggestions. You guys are our audience, there’s a special reason that we’re talking to high schools and colleges. We can talk to a major publication, but things that bunch of older people read aren’t going to be useful to us. That’s not our audience, you guys are. Feel free to reach out any time, we read and respond to any email.