On Survivor 48, Kyle Fraser’s alliance with castmate Kamilla Karthigesu helped drive him to victory. Now, the pair is teaming up in a new space, hoping for a similar outcome: they’re starting a business together. On Tuesday, the new co-founders are introducing Paprclip, a goal-focused “social accountability” app that they hope will become a more meaningful form of social media.
Inspired by their experiences in the game, post-game, and by positive psychology principles, Paprclip’s idea is to bring people together to tackle their personal goals — whether that’s a health and wellness goal or something else entirely.
The app is making its Kickstarter debut, where the team is aiming to raise an additional $40,000 towards its development.
Fraser and Karthigesu both played Survivor again in season 50, but Fraser unfortunately tore his Achilles during the filming of the first immunity challenge. He had to leave the game and start months of physical therapy, he told TechCrunch in an interview.
At the same time, his wife was pregnant, and he was contemplating his next steps as a Survivor winner.
“I had a lot of things going on in my life that required organization, but also accountability and a push from different people,” Fraser says. That led him to think of how the app Paprclip could work, by sharing clips with a friend, but with a focus on documenting and sharing their progress towards a goal.
Together, people using the app can compete in daily challenges, build their goals and habits, and upload short-form clips that document their progress. Those clips can remain private or, if agreed upon, can be shared more publicly to other social media sites.
I’m very much a habit tracker, an organization hacker,” Fraser admits. “And I thought, there’s so many habit trackers in the world and so many productivity tools, but there’s nothing that allows you to really do things together. And, as corny as it sounds, you’ll always hear me say ‘people, people, people’ — that is what I feel has made me most successful.”
That is, Fraser credits other people with helping him achieve the major goals he’s accomplished in life, which include getting into college, playing lacrosse, going through law school to become a litigator for a major record label, and finally, of course, getting cast and winning Survivor.
“I thought, why not try to develop a product that leans into something that’s helped me so significantly?,” he says.
In the app, users receive new, randomized daily challenges, meant to push them outside their comfort zone, much like the challenges on Survivor do. However, instead of testing physical strength, as Survivor often does, these challenges were developed in coordination with licensed, clinical therapists. As pairs complete the challenges, their progress is tracked in-app, and they can receive badges.
Plus, users can build their own goals, habits, and tasks both individually and as a pair, and can upload visual proof of their progress via clips, which are added to a shared page. This page works like a journal where both users can both look back on their progress and keep each other accountable. The to-do list in the app, meanwhile, can replace a user’s individual goal or habit tracking app if they prefer to use the app independently.
Fraser stresses that, despite sharing some of the community elements of a fitness app like Strava, Paprclip isn’t only meant for tracking health or exercise goals.
“I don’t see it solely as a health and wellness app. In fact, if Paprclip is functioning the way I want it to, I think people will realize that they can use it for whatever they want — people who are trying to get into different hobbies like cooking, or painting, or different endeavors. This is a social accountability app,” he says.
As in the game, Fraser and Karthigesu’s relationship as teammates has worked to their advantage, the founders believe.
“Just like in the game, I would come to Kamilla with a problem — like a puzzle, or like, ‘Kamilla, I have this crazy idea, can we pull it off?’ It literally happened in real life, where I was like, Kamilla, I want to do this,” Fraser says, and Karthigesu, a senior software engineer at Discord, had the technical skills to make it happen, he said.
Fraser adds that the new app was made by people, not by AI, which meant they hired developers and designers to assist with the work.
“I’m not critical of AI, but one thing that has been important to us is that this is an app for people, made by people,” he notes.
To help get it off the ground, Paprclip is relying on a $20,000 grant and operational support from the Flemming Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Hampden-Sydney College, where Fraser became the inaugural alumni founder to build a company through its Forge on the Hill Program. In addition, the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan awarded dedicated funding to support the app’s UX/UI design.
Besides these investments and what’s to come on Kickstarter, Paprclip has not raised outside capital.
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