While Cappuccino is a social app, it is focused on your close friends and your family. You aren’t trying to get more followers and you are not sharing public posts. Everything is private by design and focused on groups of real-life friends.

Cappuccino isn’t Poupardin’s first startup. He had worked on Whyd for several years and lived the full startup experience

After that, the Whyd team worked on a service that lets you create your own voice assistant. That didn’t really take off as expected either.

“At the time, I didn’t know if I wanted to start a company again — I pivoted 15 times [with Whyd],” Poupardin told me.

The basic premise was simple. A lot of people were listening to podcasts, but very few people were creating their own podcasts.

With Cappuccino, the idea is to take a reverse stance on these three points: short content, easy to record and personal. It’s supposed to be a better experience for both people recording audio and people listening to audio.

The first version of Cappuccino isn’t an app, it’s a side project.

“We built the first version of the app in four days by using a hack — we were using Airtable as the backend service,” Poupardin said.

But things really started to take off when Brittany Kay Collier shared a video on TikTok about Cappuccino a few weeks ago.

Over the past couple of weeks, Cappuccino attracted 225,000 new users. They created 130,000 groups and sent around one million audio stories.

The most loyal users seem to be young women in their twenties. They want to keep in touch with long-distance best friends.

“Something that is interesting with audio messages as a medium is that you tell different stories from what you would tell by taking a photo for Instagram, sending a Snap or creating a video on TikTok,”

“With video, you have YouTube, Twitch and TikTok — those are all different formats. Audio is potentially going to follow the same trend,”

Social apps first took advantage of the camera in your smartphone, because the camera was the killer hardware feature. And audio seems like the natural next step.

“It’s going to help people who feel lonely,”