A college student built CapThat, an app that slapped random captions on photos. It hit #1 in the App Store by tricking Apple's review system: clean captions for the first week, then switching to edgy ones like "addicted to cocaine." He had no idea how to make money from it.
I was a senior in college and I really wanted to know how to make an app. So I just bought a book, taught myself. I know it was called CapThat or iCapThat. iCapThat. You would select a picture from your library or take a picture and it had like an internal database of funny captions that we all just like got drunk and came up with. And so it would automatically apply one to the picture in white font. But like all the captions were sort of general enough where people thought there was like AI going on. What's an example? A stupid one would be like you take a picture of someone in here and it'd be like addicted to cocaine or something like that. And people would see that and be like, oh, he is. That's so true. It got rejected by the Apple review board or whatever for being inappropriate. So I wrote some code so that the internal database was timed because I knew the app review process took like a week. After 7 days, it would release all the dirty captions. So I got by the Apple review system. Amazing. It was the number one app in the App Store. You're just on campus. Above like eBay and Google. And I'm on campus, like, I don't know what to do because I know I should be making money from this, but I'm not. And I have no idea how to make money or anything about business.
