About a year ago I got an email from @jamesruben. After leading product at HQ Trivia, he had an idea for how to use the magic of interactive video to reimagine what screen time could be for kids.
Here are some behind-the-scenes moments from making @playhellosaurus:
The idea was to bring the interactive spirit of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues to the touchscreen generation.
Here are sketches from one of our first meetings. It's a complete mess, but you can essentially see 90% of the product surface represented here.
A couple days later, I made this little interactive prototype to start to get a feel for how the interactive surface plays together with the video container.
Over the next year I would watch a ridiculous amount of Old MacDonald Had a Farm.
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The interactive kids' experience is just one piece: the other half of Hellosaurus is the software toolkit that creators use to turn passive video into immersive, interactive content. Here are some initial wireframes of that tool (it looks very different today!)
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We went on a bit of a Branding Adventure...at one point @pieratt had drawn us a dinosaur, and though it got several new coats of paint, the dino stuck!
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For better or worse, at some point a deck must be made! We made many, many decks! Since then the company has brought on a team of great investors including @gcvp@gsvventures@ShrugCap@Chad_Hurley@zachklein and more.
Pretty soon we had real kids, playing real interactive shows, made by real creators, all using real versions of the software sketched above. 👀
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A few months ago we went hunting for the perfect person to own the product design, brand and future of Hellosaurus full-time. In a stroke of great luck we landed @mrdavenport who started last month and is already off to the races! Feels great to hand off to such capable hands.
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