Gas App: The Hottest New App for High Schoolers
Although the TBH app is a remnant of the past, one of TBH’s co-creators has launched a new app called Gas. Similar to TBH, Gas poses positive questions to teens about individuals in their school in a yearbook-style superlative format, encouraging users to compliment – or gas – each other up.
After syncing their location and contacts list up to the app, teens will be faced with a series of polls that refresh every hour. Users anonymously vote for whoever they think fits the superlative of the poll best. If an individual wins a poll, they get a “flame” delivered to their inbox. The only information they receive about who voted for them in the poll is their gender and grade.
Find Your Crush
Nikita Bier, co-creator of TBH and president of Find Your Crush LLC, which developed Gas, says that Gas is the enhanced version of TBH because its algorithm is designed to allocate compliments among people in a more equitable fashion. Gas also has an in-app currency to urge users to send more compliments. The revenue-growing component of the app is steeped in the in-app purchases that can uncover secret admirers or can keep teens’ names from appearing in the public poll results.
Unlike anonymous apps for teens that encourage toxicity and cyberbullying like Ask.fm and YikYak, Gas users have no other choice but to vote on pre-written compliments that the app feeds you, and there is no direct messaging involved.
According to Data.AI., users have downloaded Gas more than 500,000 times since its launch in late August. Although the app launched in just 12 states, it has topped downloads and reached #1 in the App Store. It seems that Bier has cracked the code in developing an anonymous app for highschoolers that is not toxic and rather promotes uplifting and compassionate behavior.
Promote Your Brand
The holidays are around the corner, and brands can take advantage of some of the Gas app’s features on Instagram. For example, this can be used as a fun and interactive IG story series. Brands can gauge interest and harness engagement in a particular topic with the poll option. If a brand wants to know if consumers would like a certain product versus other products before rolling it out, they can put up a poll matching the Gas app format: from a girl in Marketing – Which product would you like to see next? Overall, the Gas app has an unlimited inspiration that we can draw on to promote our own brands.
Gas launched on Apple’s App Store on Aug. 29 and has been downloaded over 5 million times. (Washington Post illustration; Gas App)
