Orange County Student Creates Viral Spotify Instafest App

20-year-old University High graduate from Irvine creates viral Spotify festival poster app: 11M users in just 7 days!

Every music fan has their own personal dream festival, but most would never be able to see every one of their favorite bands in the big (then medium-sized, then tiny) fonts on a flyer.

But thanks to 20-year-old University of Southern California computer science student Anshay Saboo, you can make make those festival dreams a reality — on the internet at least.

At Irvine's Uni High Anshay was the president of Launch X ( an MIT initiative at that time), a student club devoted to help students develop Entrepreneurship skills from idea to a business plan. Their team went to MIT finals two years in a row, a selection of only top 10 from among hundreds of student teams around the world.

At Uni High, he also developed an App called Grades which works with Aeries school information system. The app helps students and parents track the student Grades easily without having to login to Aeries portal. It had over 250Kdownloads and is used by students country wide.

While still in high school in Orange County Anshay also developed and deployed UniConnect, a centralized source of information for students, parents, and teachers to view details on school activities, calendar, schedule, news, and more. The app is in the fourth year of use currently at his alma mater Uni High.

Spotify Instafest - A Viral Worldwide Hit!

His latest project, Spotify Instafest, is similar to the streaming service's ubiquitous "Wrapped" social media campaign, which analyzes a listener's most-played artists and presents the results in an easy-to-share format. But instead of listing play counts, Instafest connects to your profile, crunches your streaming statistics and creates a convincing-looking poster showing a three-day Coachella-style festival lineup of your most-played artists. Saboo came up with the idea in the spring as festival season was approaching.

"I remember I was in bed just scrolling through TikTok. And I was looking at all these festival posts. And I was like, 'If I was planning this festival, I’d want this person, and this person. Those are going to be headliners,'" Saboo told SFGATE in his first phone interview about the project. "... So I kind of took that idea and ran with it. That same day, I had a working prototype that had the Spotify integration and everything."

Although the core functionality worked, he got bogged down in the design details, and the project dragged on until he decided that he had to finish it during Thanksgiving break.

"I just worked on it for a full day, finished it, and then posted it online," Saboo said. "And now here we are within a week, and somehow it just steadily exponentially grew over the past week. And we’ve had over six and a half million users on the app, and it’s still going up fast, too.”

Looking at the current version of the app, it makes sense why it took so long. A similar app already existed, but doesn't include nearly as many features, and the results don't look as slick when shared on social media. Users can pick from three flyer designs, which Saboo created himself in Adobe Illustrator. You can also choose whether to analyze your listening habits from the past four weeks, six months or all time. And the app is still being updated, most recently with a "Basic Score" that analyzes how niche your tastes are.

The app’s popularity has skyrocketed, partly from big shares from influential musicians like Questlove, whom Saboo felt particularly honored by.

"The first one I saw was Questlove. That was incredible to me, someone on that level that I looked up to posting something that I made. And he looked like he had a good time using it, that he was happy with his festival, too."...