[1][2][3] Tom Scott and Matt Gray were inspired to create the app after seeing the success of Yo and the release of new emoji characters by the Unicode Consortium.

[4][5] During a talk at Electromagnetic Field Festival, the developers commented that the app originated largely as a joke, but that by the time of launch 70,000 unique usernames had been reserved.

[2] After press coverage the developers began receiving offers for venture capital.

[7] Due to the cost and effort of maintaining the application, the developers closed the app on 30 July 2015.

[7][8] The back end of the app was coded by Tom Scott in PHP and MySQL and the front end was designed and programmed by Matt Gray in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.