I cannot say with 100% certainty that nineteen-year-old Justin Jin is not pulling an elaborate prank on me. In my defense, Jin’s company Giggles – which he describes as “putting a trading app and TikTok together” – started as a joke.
“This was around 2023, when TikTok was rumored to get banned and whatnot, and people were trying to find a new social media platform,” Jin told TechCrunch. “So I started this meme about an app called Giggles, and it wasn’t real at the time, but it went viral on TikTok.”
The name is a riff on an existing joke — people on TikTok would see someone post a stale meme and reply, “bro got banned from google giggles.” It’s supposed to be the kind of place where you’d post millennial cringe (like Threads), only it’s not real. But then Jin made it real.
Jin said he created a landing page for the fake app and a logo that makes it look like it could be a real Google app. The site included a field where people could sign up for a waitlist. The site got 100,000 visits in one day, so Jin called up his friend Edwin Wang to actually make an app.
Jin and Wang weren’t Stanford roommates, or coworkers at McKinsey, or buddies from a startup incubator – no, Jin met his co-founder when he was a YouTuber running a dubious marketplace on Minecraft that eventually got shut down for violating platform monetization rules.
The new company that Jin would end up creating is something that could only come from a Minecraft YouTuber who collects NFT …