Five years ago, businesswoman Prerna Gupta was writing a sci-fi fantasy triology set in Silicon Valley in the future for young adults. After telling her friends about her latest project, she came to the realization that teens and young adults unfortunately don’t read books, bringing her back to the drawing board to brainstorm different ideas. Gupta eventually landed on “text stories,” resulting in the launch of her app Hooked.
“We tell bite-size stories in three different formats; text, audio, and video. When we first started out, the stories were basically as if two people were texting each other and some sort of drama unfolds. Some of our most popular initial stories were actually horror stories, where a mom gets a text from her daughter and something creepy is happening to her. Over time, we started to turn those into podcasts, which then led to making our own movies and TV shows,” Gupta tells Celeb Secrets over an IG Livestream.
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Since we were forced to go into lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic last March, we’ve found ourselves utilizing technology now more than ever to not only connect with our loved ones, but also to keep busy during our time at home. In the past year, tons of teens turned to Hooked for their daily dose of entertainment, as the app is now number one in the App Store in over 25 countries and reaches hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
“It’s so much bigger than we could have ever imagined,” she shares. “Our goal when we first started was really just to make stories more engaging on the phone and really readable. We created these texting stories and it just sort of took on a life of its own.”
During this difficult time, Gupta has seen that the most popular stories among teens are both romance and horror that focus on interpersonal relations.
“Teens are really feeling lonely. I think social media created that in a lot of ways, but it’s gotten so much worse obviously the past year with the pandemic,” Prerna says. “The sorts of stories that really resonate with [teens] are stories that evoke strong emotions and really focus on interpersonal relationships — whether that’s a relationship between a parent and a child or partners who love each other — it’s, that’s a common theme.”
But romance and horror are not the only types of stories users can read on the app. Gupta tells us that there are so many different topics that are covered by Hooked, and they are written by writers from various backgrounds, countries, genders and professions.
“We work with writers all over the world. They’re mostly professional writers who have either studied creative writing in school or have been doing that as part of their career in one way or another,” she shares. “They come from very different walks of life. Some of them are TV writers or screenwriters for movies, others are novelists, and people of different ages. We started by reaching out to people through universities and in creative writing programs, and we started to get inbound interest and then our network just grew.”
“I started Hooked when I was writing my own novel. The protagonist of this novel is a young Indian female, and there has never been to this day, a massive sci-fi fantasy franchise with a young Indian female. And I felt like there is so much bias towards what’s worked in the past, and if we always just keep investing in things that have worked in the past, it’s never going to give a chance for people who look and sound different to break out. And that’s been my mission with Hooked. The way that we do that is because we go direct to our audience. We can give unknown writers, unknown actors and actresses, directors, and producers a chance.”
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As for the future of Hooked? Prerna hopes to bring comedy stories to the app, as well as introduce interactive storytelling using AI.
“One of the genres we haven’t really nailed yet is comedy. You would think that would be one of the first things that would work, you know, because there’s so much comedy happening in social feeds all the time. But it’s actually been harder,” she says.
“We are also working on a new feature — interactive storytelling using AI — which is kind of futuristic and really fun. We are creating the ability for people to talk to the characters from some of our TV shows.
“There’s this show called ‘House Rules’ and there’s this girl Emma and this guy Dylan, and after the pilot, Dylan will call you and you can have a conversation with Dylan. He thinks Emma’s cheating on him and then like a few minutes later, Emma calls and she just saw Dylan talking to another girl. And so it’s kind of fun drama that you can insert yourself into.”
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You can learn more about Prerna’s business journey by watching our full IG Livestream below. Don’t forget to download Hooked here and follow us on IG at @celebsecrets for more livestreams with your favorite stars.
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