Snowball

Snowball emerged in 2014 as a solution for managing the ever-increasing volume of notifications on Android devices. The company was founded by Anish Acharya and Jeson Patel, two University of Waterloo friends who had previously founded and sold a social gaming company, SocialDeck, to Google in 2010. Acharya's experience at Google, including a stint at Google Ventures, and Patel's work on Google Play Games provided them with deep insights into the mobile ecosystem, which spurred the creation of Snowball. Their journey reflects a transition from creating platforms that generate notifications to building a tool to manage them effectively.

Operating in the mobile application market, Snowball's business was focused on providing a free-to-use Android app that acted as a replacement for the native notification system. The application's primary function was to consolidate messages from various platforms—including SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and others—into a single, unified inbox. This allowed users to view, manage, and reply to messages without needing to switch between different apps. The app featured a persistent on-screen element, a small yeti icon, that provided quick access to the aggregated message stream, a concept similar to Facebook's Chat Heads. Over time, Snowball's system was designed to learn user preferences, allowing for the prioritization or hiding of notifications from specific apps based on user behavior. The business model was predicated on user acquisition and engagement, with the app being offered for free on the Google Play Store.

In October 2014, Snowball secured $2.3 million in a seed funding round from a syndicate of investors that included First Round Capital, Google Ventures, and Felicis Ventures. This investment underscored investor confidence in the team and their solution to notification overload. The company operated for just over a year before being 'acqui-hired' by Credit Karma in December 2015. Following the acquisition, Acharya took on roles at Credit Karma, eventually becoming a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on consumer and fintech investments.

Keywords: Snowball app, Anish Acharya, Jeson Patel, Android notification manager, unified inbox, message aggregator, SocialDeck, Credit Karma acquisition, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, mobile productivity, notification management, app consolidation, messaging hub, tech startup, San Francisco, seed funding, mobile utility, Android app, user experience