Pinckney and Yin came up with the idea for Verse while they were working on Discz. They added a Profile feature for the app that users could drag and drop songs or images onto. Although the duo added the feature to allow users to express what kind of music they like, they saw that people were using it as a creative tool.

“What we thought was going to be a way for people to express like, this is who I am and what music I like, turned out to be a tool of choice for users,” Pinckney told TechCrunch. “And this just blew our minds, because we didn’t expect it at all. We’re like, this is a music app, and we gave these users a Profile, but they’re literally using our platform to create media that they then share elsewhere.”