MemeBao development journal: a personal GIF sticker tool built in a day

Where the idea came from

This was my second product: even smaller and simpler, completely free, built for my own use and to test a few ideas I had been carrying around.

At a previous company, I worked on a project called MemeZoo. We wanted to begin with memes and eventually move into AI image generation, but the company gave us very little time and closed the project in less than two months. Our team had spent a month getting the first version online. After leaving that job, I no longer had that convenient meme editor, so I decided to recreate my own project and see what efficiency looked like in the age of vibe coding.

In the end, I recreated almost 100% of the old project in a single day. By my admittedly crude calculation, that made vibe coding 3,780 times as efficient as writing it all by hand.

What the app does

Its purpose is very simple: turn a video into a GIF sticker that can be sent directly in WeChat.

• Add a caption, with just two styles: white text with a black outline, or black text with a white outline.

• Add stickers from your own images, or find some through GIPHY.

• Play the GIF forwards, backwards, or back and forth in ping-pong mode.

The point is to be small and fast. I did not see a difficult technical problem or a compelling reason to monetize it, so it is completely free: just my companion for making WeChat stickers. One useful detail is that you can import Live Photos and turn them straight into stickers.

Because I originally made it for myself, it did not really have a proper name. It was called EasyMemeMaker, followed by a long slogan to avoid clashing with another app's name. Perhaps being in a relationship had brought out my fondness for baby talk, but “表情包包” suddenly sounded right. That became its Chinese name, and the English name became MemeBao.

If you also like turning little moments from everyday videos into stickers for WeChat, download it and give it a try.