WeVue is the hot new music and entertainment mobile app that has the world buzzing right now! Pretty much anyone (for free!) can use the mobile app to connect and gather photos / videos from any event they attend and turn them into a “vue” aka a montage collection video that can be shared globally.
One of the masterminds behind the app is Saxon Baum, who took some time to connect with The Levity Ball from his home in Florida to chat about his hot new app product…
How did you come up with the concept of WeVue?
“To start, I love going to events. I enjoy everything from a good concert to a hockey game, and growing up in Pittsburgh I was able to attend most of my favorite events because of my proximity to a major city. When I went to college, that all changed. I attended Miami University in Ohio and truly was surrounded by miles and miles of cornfields. As you can imagine, I was not able to make it to all of the events I wanted to, so I would scour the Internet following the event that I had missed trying to find real fan content to relive the event. What I found was that fan content in this realm did not truly exist and most of the picture and video content was sourced from professional photographers and videographers. I was looking for a way to immerse myself into the event or situation that I was missing out on and there was no easy way to do so. Simultaneously, when I did go to events, I constantly saw phones and cameras in the air capturing this content, but I wondered where was this content going? This content was being put up on individual social networks and essentially being lost across the web. The only way to see someone’s content from an event was if you were friends with them or followed them on social media. I knew there had to be a better way to gather these pictures around any type of event.”
Why does today’s society need an app like WeVue?
“People are so obsessed with the self. Everyone wants to be the best or have the most likes. Our society is completely self absorbed and only worried about one person, himself or herself. We continually see the creation of applications and businesses based around sharing your own content and letting people see what you are doing. What ever happened to the aspect of a team or crowd? If I am at an event with ten of my friends, why can’t we all post and view our content to one forum instead of all of us sharing these memories separately? People inherently work better with other people; collaboration is the key to success. So why would we not want to highlight the strengths of our species and push for the collaboration of content. It is amazing what people can do when they work together. We are trying to bring the world together through pictures and videos, one friend group, family, or team at a time.”
What makes your app different than others out there? 
“WeVue takes two types of apps that are currently on the market and marries them into one solution. First there are crowd sourcing apps: There are many apps trying to tackle the problem of gathering pictures and videos, we do this and it is event driven. Secondly there are movie creation apps. There are many apps out there that allow you to make movies on your phone with the content from your own camera roll. WeVue takes both of these pieces of technology and brings them together into one mobile application. WeVue allows a user to gather picture and video content around any type of event and also gives the user a tool or utility to create something. This movie or VUE as we call it is composed of fan content and can be made by any attendee of the event.”
What advice do you have for others looking at getting into the mobile tech industry?
“Make sure you are ready for a roller coaster ride. The tech world moves so fast, especially in the mobile world, that you need to be ready for anything. The competition is fierce whether you are in Silicon Valley or Tampa. Likewise, there are so many unseen obstacles that go into every part of growing a modern technology company. For example, when we were almost finished with our initial BETA product we realized that Apple would be releasing a new iOS version several weeks after we had completed the product. What did this mean for us? This meant we had to go back and redesign the entire app to fit iOS 7 conventions. This is just an example of how fast the tech world moves and how one change in Apple’s infrastructure can throw out months of work on our end.”
What is the best advice you have ever been given while developing this app?
“The simple fact that product development never stops. Before starting WeVue I had no idea how much development went into each individual moving piece of software. I realized very quickly that this stuff is not easy and if there is something broken it can’t always be fixed overnight. I have sat through countless product meetings where I thought my team was talking in circles and not truly advancing the product. Looking back, I see that I was completely wrong; it just took a little longer than expected. Sometimes I need to be reminded by my partner Taylor Wallace that Rome was not built overnight.”
What does the future hold for WeVue?
“The future holds everything. We are a young company both in age and in conception. We have only been around for two years so the future is extremely exciting for us. We are going to begin work on our Android product rather soon as well as a fully fledged web application that will allow the infiltration of other devices not just phones. We also want to keep wearable cameras and wearable technology in our minds. Here’s a thought, you’re on Vail Mountain enjoying an amazing day on the slopes but you forgot your camera. Now, it won’t matter because WeVue will be hosting all of the cameras across the mountain allowing a user to pick what he or she wants to see through the eyes of any given camera.
Are you working on any other apps?
“We have said from day one: we are building a company not just an app. One thing that is essential for any entrepreneur to be successful is laser focus. I continually see companies fail because they are trying to do too much. My team and I are completely focused on one thing, creating a successful pro duct. We are starting to focus on an enterprise application for WeVue that would allow the creation of private groups restricting access to certain email addresses creating a private social network for the group. This is further down the line though, for now we are in the market to make the best product for the consumer.”
As a person, what would you like to be remembered for overall?
“As a person, I want to be remembered as someone that pushed people to there limit and got the maximum out of their potential. I may make you mad, I may push your buttons, but at the end of the day I am someone that wants everyone around me to succeed. Sometimes people need a fire lit under their ass and I love being that catalyst. I believe in hard work and those values have been instilled onto my team. I know its cliché, but work hard play hard has never been truer than in the start up culture.”
If you could change one thing in the world what would it be?
“I would love to see big business take less of a bureaucratic structure and take more of a startup type approach. Great ideas get buried under piles of bureaucratic BS everyday in big businesses. If these corporations took more of an agile approach, I believe that employees would be more productive and their overall spirits would be higher.”
If you could have ever worked with either Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, which would you have wanted to work with more and why?
“I think working with either of them would be very hard due to the level of perfection needed. But, if I had to choose, I would have to say Jobs because he was a visionary. I also feel like Jobs had many more experiences than Zuckerberg in terms of the real world. Zuckerberg was a college kid at Harvard who started a business out of his dorm room and then saw massive, speedy adoption. Jobs had a crazy path to success including him actually being removed as the CEO of Apple and then proving himself once again and getting rehired. Don’t get me wrong, Zuckerberg is amazing and he has developed one of the most useful products for connecting the world that we have seen to date, but he’s no Steve Jobs. It is like comparing Lebron James and Michael Jordan, Zuckerberg being Lebron and Jobs being Jordan. They are both amazing players and they both have proven to the people that they are winners, but only one of them has 6 rings. Lebron has the potential to be the next Jordan but there is only one Michael Jordan and there is and will only ever be one Steve Jobs.”
