Priscilla Alvarez

A late night phone call from a friend inspired University of Virginia alum Joshua Anton to create a way of preventing college students from accidentally drunk dialing their contacts. The result? A mobile app called Drunk Mode.

“At a block party I had gotten a few calls from a girl that I knew probably wouldn’t have said those same things if she was sober," says Anton. " I thought it would be an interesting idea.”

But having no personal experience in coding, Anton needed partners. He looked for partners both at home and at his university to help in the building process. Seven months and $560 later, he and his team launched Drunk Mode in April of 2013.

In the first week alone, the app had 700 downloads. That number has grown exponentially since. Between its launch in 2013 and February 2014, the app got 10,000 downloads. That number now stands at 92,000 and is projected to break 100,000 by the week's end.

“I would say a lot of it has been people knowing about the app and it kind of spreading by itself,” Anton says.

But the app's additional features have also attracted downloaders, according to Anton.

In addition to blocking contacts for a specified period of time, Drunk Mode also has a Snapchat recovery and safety features.

For Android users, the Snapchat feature makes all the Snapchats sent the night before reviewable. This tool will be made available to iOS users by spring.

The app also has safety features called “Find My Drunk” and “Breadcrumbs.” The former allows users to track their friends' locations while the latter keeps track of where the user goes during the course of the night. Both update a given user's location - and time that user was there - each time the app is opened.

Virginia Tech student Miranda Setliff finds this feature especially exciting.

“Any precaution that you’re taking being alone at night is always a plus. I don't know if I would feel as safe as if I had someone with me but it’s a good way of tracking people,” Setliff says.

Drunk Mode's popularity has extended beyond the U.S., with users spreading from South America to Europe. Domestically, however, the target user demographic continues to be college students.

University of Alabama student Jake Ellenburg is part of that initiative. After learning about Drunk Mode during one of its university soft launches, Ellenburg contacted Anton through Twitter and joined the team as a public relations representative.

“I thought from day one that it was going to explode," says Ellenburg. "I knew it had a lot of potential."

Despite the difficultly of balancing schoolwork and marketing for Drunk Mode, Ellenburg says he continues to see the app growing in popularity among his peers.

“It’s cool running into people around campus that have downloaded it that I’ve never met before and use it,” says Ellenburg.

In the next few months, Anton plans to release more updates that will increase the reliability of the app as well as new features that will maximize its utility.

“My ultimate objective is to make something that people love and use everyday…as well as helping a few people with their daily nightlife issues from drunk dialing to knowing where their friends are,” says Anton.



This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.