How a Twilio-Built Scream App Went Viral on TikTok

How a Twilio-Built Scream App Went Viral on TikTok

From the global pandemic to social injustices and political polarization, many of us were left wanting to scream at the world and out into the universe in 2020, looking for some kind of relief from the frustration. At the end of the year, Just Scream was born, designed as a creative outlet and opportunity to air grievances into the void. The Twilio-based app became the ultimate viral source of catharsis after a long, difficult year spent in isolation and frustration for so many.

Meet the creator: Chris Gollmar

Chris Gollmar’s passion for coding began in the third grade. With no formal training in code or programming, he embraces the “building” mindset embodied by many developers using Twilio. Working as a teacher in Brooklyn, New York, Gollmar uses Twilio to build creative projects.

Gollmar first built with Twilio during his undergraduate years studying music composition. Using Programmable Voice he built Just Listen, an app designed to help people stop, listen to, and describe their surroundings. Just Listen enabled people to record messages about their surroundings as well as listen to messages from previous callers.

“It was the perfect way to explore Twilio and get used to a lot of the different features,” said Gollmar. “Unfortunately there were about seven people who participated. So it was a start, right?”

What inspired the project?

In the fall of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic stretched on in the United States and the country approached a polarized presidential election, Gollmar searched for a new creative coding outlet and turned again to Twilio to bring the app to life.

“Screaming just seemed to be an appropriate topic in September,” said Gollmar. “I knew the election season was coming up too so I sort of scrambled to get things out the door.”

Just Scream was designed to encourage people to interact with an auditory medium without having to have a conversation, interact via video, or download a new app on their device. All you had to do was dial +1-561-567-8431, scream after listening to the prerecorded instructions, and hang up.

Just Scream soft-launched in October, a few weeks before Election Day, with the hope of helping people to get out their frustrations in a healthy way. Gollmar did not plan to maintain the project forever and set an estimated end-date for the project around January 21, 2021, one day after Inauguration Day.

“Even though there’s this sort of like social stigma now about picking up the phone and actually using your voice to communicate with someone, it’s just easy enough and Just Scream is just silly enough that people will do it,” said Gollmar, with a laugh. “Where [Just Scream] really took off was with teenagers [calling in] on TikTok.”

Viral success on TikTok

With over 1.2 million videos in the #JustScream tag on TikTok, Gollmar’s app became an overnight viral success.

“I had 100,000 calls in 24 hours,” said Gollmar, laughing.

People loved the idea, uploading TikToks of themselves screaming into their phones or reacting to the screams uploaded onto the Just Scream site. Gollmar’s small, creative side project took on an entirely new meaning.

“I think people find it entertaining, I think people find it sort of endearing that [they] can get that feeling out,” said Gollmar. “It’s been really exciting.”

How Just Scream was built

As the scale of the project grew, Gollmar’s one-person operation was thrown into overdrive trying to keep up with all of the new submissions.

“I like making things, [and] Twilio makes it very easy for me to make things like this,” said Gollmar. “I’ve got my Python scripts in the backend and it’s all fairly simple infrastructure. It’s mostly in combining things and designing things where I get to be creative.”

The app was originally built using static TwiML bins, specifically using the <Say> and <Record> verbs, to keep it simple.

“I had a script that pulled everything down and I just ran it manually twice or three times a day,” said Gollmar. “I downloaded some of the metadata into an SQLite database and there was a Flask application, a very small, simple application that I used to generate a static website.”

Every day, Gollmar manually pulled screens with Python scripts and loaded them onto his server. He then used a Flask app to generate static files.

“I would have designed a different process had I known there would have been lots of calls,” said Gollmar. “There really wasn’t a moderation backend, so every day I wrote custom SQL to mark things as acceptable or not on the website.”

With the overnight success of TikTok, Gollmar had to rethink the app’s infrastructure and ship changes fast.

“I set up another live Flask app and everyone who calls in, now the calls are sent to a webhook. It’s just my little gatekeeper. X number of calls in x number of seconds are allowed in, and then the rest get a busy signal. Just to help me control the flow of traffic,” said Gollmar.

“That was a fun piece to write because I wanted it to perform really quickly, so it’s just this tiny Flask app and that’s the only thing it does. Actually, most of the work, like the actual TwiML that’s sent back, is from a Lua script running in Redis,” said Gollmar. “So I’ve got a little Redis database that counts how many people have called in and then there’s some embedded Lua script that sends the right TwiML back… If [the callers] are let through, there is a dynamic Flask app that has the rest of the TWiML for the really basic voice tree that they get to [interact with].”

If you’re feeling inspired to build your own Voice app, check out these resources:

• Getting Started with Programmable Voice
• Voice Tutorials
• API Reference Docs
• TwiML

What’s next?

The calls haven’t stopped coming into Just Scream. Even now, you can still get a busy signal during peak calling times.

“Suffice it to say, [the reaction to Just Scream] really exceeded my expectations,” said Gollmar. “I still have this huge backlog of recordings to listen to, I have 131,000 recordings [of screams]. I listen to all of them because I felt I really had to take a strict moderation approach because I put them all online.”

The influx of content hasn’t slowed him down or discouraged him from the project, either. Just Scream and its seemingly endless log of recorded screams still exists, but the phone number now directs callers to a different prompt for recording, asking instead for messages of hope.

“Before I knew that anything was going to happen [with the app], I thought that on January 21 I would basically just stop taking calls and the website would just sort of be there with all of the recordings,” said Gollmar.

“People still call in to scream, but they don’t record anymore. They just have seven seconds of silence. You can [dial] to record a message of hope.”

These new messages of hope often look to the future, emphasizing themes of togetherness and community during a time of social isolation and difficulty.

“The ones that I really appreciate the most… are about community and [sound like] ‘we got this!’ and ‘I know it’s really hard right now but we’re going to make it through,’” said Gollmar.

“I think what would keep me going [with this project] in the long run is getting to that sort of sustainable place where it’s not tens of thousands of people screaming every day, but [where] it feels like people are sharing messages with each other or with the world.”

To leave your own message of hope, call +1-561-567-8431 and dial to record. Recorded screams are still available to listeners at justscream.baby.