Hooked (app)

Hooked is a freemium smartphone app that allows users to write or read short stories made up of text messages between characters.[1][2] CEO Prerna Gupta described the app as "books for the Snapchat generation" or "Twitter for fiction."[3] As of March 2019, the app had more than 40 million active users.[4]

The stories are written by a mix of professional authors and crowd-sourced participants.[5] The most popular genres are suspense and horror.[1] The stories usually lack literary elements like character arcs, are simply written and are intended to be suspenseful or addicting.[6] Each piece of fiction on the app is approximately 1,000 to 1,300 words long and can be read in about five minutes.[3][4] Some longer stories are told in "chapters" and a 32,000-word thriller called Dark Matter was released in 2018.[4]

The app provides a certain number of text messages for free, then delays the next text message by 15 minutes unless the user pays for a subscription.[7][4] Prior to 2020, the app offered a three-day free trial and then required users to pay.[8] According to Gupta, the app was intended to get the younger generation to read more without getting distracted.[9] Most users of the app are between 13 and 24 years-old.[7][6]

The Hooked app was first released in September 2015.[5] Initially, Hooked featured about 200 stories that were written by professional authors selected by the app developers.[3][10] The following year, Telepathic Inc. released Hooked 2.0, which allowed users of the app to create and share their own short stories.[11] By mid-2016, the app had 700 stories written by professional authors and 9,000 stories written by users.[10]

Hooked had 1.8 million downloads by 2016[7] and 20 million download as of 2017, which generated $6.5 million in revenue.[12] The response to Hooked prompted others to create similar text-message based short story apps, like Yarn and Tap.[13] Starting in 2020, longer stories were introduced on the app in chapters.[14]

The idea for Hooked was conceived when Gupta was working on writing a book of her own.[1][3] She and her husband tested short stories with 15,000 people and found that readers were five times more likely to read a story to its end if the story was presented in a text message format.[1][6] They created Telepathic Inc., which developed Hooked.[15]

As of 2017, the Telepathic has raised $6 million in funding to develop and support the Hooked app.[3][6][15][4][16]