Dollify: the story behind the doll app used by celebrities

Hello guys!
I really enjoyed making this video, I spent several hours in the IG profile of dave.xp looking for nice portraits to feature on the video, It seemed like I was stalking him! Haha! I hope you like it.
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I'll take a guess here and say that this illustration looks familiar to you. If you're one of the nearly 1 billion Instagram users in the world, you've probably seen a drawing like this before, right? They're everywhere, a lot of people, mostly girls, have been posting this cartoon version of their face in their social media profiles.
Users create these drawings in an app called Dollify, where users can create their "dollified" personas using the tools in the app.
The popularity of this app has reached levels that personalities like Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven from Stranger Things) has been using a picture like this for her Instagram profile.
But how did this app got so popular? Did you know that the app reached the top of the Google Play and Apple App Store after investing almost nothing in advertising, yeah, almost nothing.
Today, though, we're going to explain how an Instagram profile of a guy posting their illustrations began to grow to the point that the story ended up in one of the most popular apps in 2019.
All of this began with the Instagram account belonging to David, an illustrator and digital animator. Back in June 2017, he started to upload illustrations of some cartoon characters, personal friends, and artists in his Instagram profile, which at the time had around 5,000 followers. Before that, the account was about different styles of illustration.
Then he began to tag the different personalities in the post of their drawing, like the band First Aid Kit and Daisy Ridley. Some of them, like Hillary Duff, Jojo Siwa, and Rachel Platten, even replied their posts, giving a big shout out to the account.
Also, people began to upload portraits of the contestants on shows like America's Got Talent, taking advantage of the boost that they used to get on the Internet after their participation in the show. Most of the drawings of famous people he used to upload was done in a day or the day after that artist released something important, such as a music video, a Netflix show, and the like.
One of those drawings is about an illustration he made of Jenna Ortega, an actress who was featured in a couple of popular TV shows, or at least famous for the followers of the account. That drawing provided a significant boost of for the account, passing from 14,000 followers at the day of the post to 40,000 after two weeks.
Time was soaring by, and the account continued to grow. The style of drawing keeps evolving, from something like this to something like this. People began to ask for commissions, and he began to make them, also making giveaways and stuff like that.
At this point, you can understand what kind of users used to follow David's account; most of them were young women in their early twenties.
At the same time, he began to share some tutorials speed painting techniques, while making-off videos of his art in a parallel KZbin channel. He also had some videos talking about the growth of his Instagram project as well. Part of these parallel projects involved a digital book where he explained some tactics and his experience about the growth of his account.
In one of those videos, he talked about the time when Grace Vanderwall, (yep, the one from America's Got Talent), a very young singer. She liked and commented on one of the drawings that he made of her. In the upcoming days, the manager of the singer emailed David asking for the rights of one of the pictures; they wanted it to use it for the artist's merch. David sold the rights, but for unknown reasons, the producers never used that drawing in the merch, even when they purchased the rights to it.
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Here at Explainosphere, we like explaining things. As curious and eccentric as they may seem, we believe there is always someone, somewhere, trying to figure out how things work.
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