After Apple introduced iMessage apps, Nexus wanted to get into the emoji stickers game and create a winning app in this new category.

We started by searching the App Store for different animals. Our goal was to identify a popular animal that didn’t yet have a great emoji app. We landed on pugs.

Next, we hired Ana Fonseca, a Portuguese illustrator we had previously collaborated with on an alphabet app. Ana sent over a few sketches, and we immediately knew we had a great look for our hero character.

From here we contacted a client, Toren Ajk, with our pitch – a pug emoji app with 60 stickers in the style of Ana’s sketches.

Brett Wharton designed the app interface, and Srinivas Naathireddy built the app in Swift.

Aiming to please everyone, we created three ways for users to share our emoji stickers. Users could share emoji from inside the app (by copying and pasting), from the iOS Messages app, and with an emoji keyboard that users could install from the Settings menu.

One of the app’s unique features is the ability to search the app for keywords, and have the app suggest stickers based on your keyword search. For example, you can search for “happy” and then any stickers that we tagged with that keyword will appear in search results.

Since launching, the app has garnered 600 ratings averaging 4.8 stars. It’s also broken into the App Store’s USA top charts, as one of the top 100 most downloaded paid apps in the Entertainment category.

Today, the app has an active Facebook page with 3,700 followers. Even after social media marketing and Apple Search Ads, the app consistently earns hundreds of dollars per month in passive income for Toren.