On TikTok, Daze’s most popular video has been viewed 8 million times. Across TikTok and Instagram, the startup behind a new messaging app aimed at Gen Z, has seen around 48 million combined views. Pre-launch, the app’s waitlist is already bursting with roughly 156,000 signups.
Driving the demand for this next-generation alternative to iMessage and WhatsApp isn’t some smooth-talking influencer or paid advertising, but simply product demo videos of the app in action, which have impressed a younger audience.
Founded by New York-based serial entrepreneur Willem Simons, Daze offers a freestyle messaging app that takes its clues from social media. Similar to crafting an Instagram story using a variety of fonts, styles, graphics, and more, users’ chats are no longer limited to blue and green bubbles. Instead, multi-colored messages can float across the screen complemented by photos, graphics, stickers, GIFs, drawings, decorated backgrounds, and more.
In addition, the app is currently leveraging AI to help power some of its creative tools; it plans to deeply integrate more AI-based technology in the future.
“Our goal with Daze has been to make a feature complete messenger that is competitive with iMessage, WhatsApp, etc., while still having a suite of really fun and creative features,” Simons told TechCrunch. “You can quickly type a message and press send, or drag the message anywhere within the chat. It is easy to use and utilitarian, but also very free and unconstrained.”
This isn’t the first time Simons has experimented with this idea. For several years, ending in 2022, he was working on an app with a similar vibe called Muze. Like Daze, Muze redesigned mobile messaging as a free-form canvas for creativity with a similar set of tools. But while Muze was jointly founded by Simons along with Douglas Witte and Grant Davis with Fenner Stevens as CEO, Daze is solely Simons’ project.
The new app, which is a pivot from Daze’s beginnings as a social calendar, has been built entirely in React Native to ensure it could launch simultaneously on iOS and Android. Currently, Daze’s launch is scheduled for November 4. Ahead of this, the app has been in early testing with around 1,400 invite-only beta users.
While beta metrics still have to be proven out in the real world, one promising figure shared by a source familiar with the company’s tests indicates that Daze’s 60-day retention for people who have sent a message on the app is more than 50%.
Not surprisingly, this freeform messenger is skewing younger, with most testers falling in the 13–to-22-year-old demographic, Simons notes.
The startup’s team of seven full-time and one part-time are largely based in New York, with only a few people working remotely.
Prelaunch, Daze has raised $5.7 million in funding from a16z, Kindred Ventures, Alpaca Ventures, Uncommon Projects, Betaworks, Maveron, 35 Ventures, New Wave, Antoine Martin, and others.