Introduction

Creating a hit new social media application in 2023 is a tough business. Original ideas for compelling new social products are hard enough to come by. Competing for users and attention in a crowded, cut-throat competitive landscape even harder. Even sticking around long enough to survive and evolve into a mainstay product hundreds of millions of people will use everyday is nearly impossible.

Why is it so hard to make a successful new social media product and how did we get here? Why do a select few social media apps come to dominate our daily lives and grow into multi-billion-dollar multi-national mega corporations while so many more never even make it to the Top 100 on the App Store?

At least 3 things need to go right for a new social product to succeed:

1. Build an incredible product - really hard 😢

2. Acquire enough users to achieve sufficient network effects - risky, expensive, resource-intensive 😫

3. *Do steps 1 and 2 quickly enough that you can establish a moat around your user community before a competitor with an established user base takes second-mover advantage of you 🤯 - ****that is, the competitive edge a company has when it enters the market later than other companies

As I have never built a social product myself, step 1 falls outside our scope.

But as a Senior Growth Manager at The Aave Companies focused on Lens Protocol, a decentralized social graph protocol, I have thoughts on Steps 2 and 3.

Think about all the things you are asking a new user to do to try your cool new product:

Download the app/visit the site

Create an account and fill out your account details/profile

Follow other users and get them to follow you back

Create a post and engage on the product

That’s a lot of stuff! It’s reasonable to understand why most people are not interested in doing this very often, some are happy with the apps they currently use while others are not trying to spend less - not more - time using social media apps anyways.

But of those four steps, the third is the biggest ask of all: no one likes having to start the “social game” of growing their followers and following their friends again every time they want to try a new social application. And the more followers you have, the more work you will have to do to recreate your follower base from one application in another. This helps explain why the first generation of TikTok stars were not established celebrities or Instagram influencers, but an entirely new generation of early-adopter creators who found success by being early and willing to put in the time and effort to grow a following from scratch.

There are solutions to tackling the second-mover advantage problem (that will be introduced here but addressed in detail in part 2)- but before we dive into them, let’s first understand how we got here and take a look at the current environment for building new social products. There is a lot to learn from some of the most (in)famous examples of the second-mover advantage problem in action, just ask Snapchat, Clubhouse, and (most recently) BeReal.

It’s never been a scarier time to try to build a new social product

Founders face an immense uphill battle to grow from concept to MVP to viable business. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a new social product founder:

First and foremost, we must create a differentiated and exciting product that people actually want to use. Let’s assume we’ve got the team, funding, and experience we need to pull that off. It’s no secret that securing essential venture funding alone is a major challenge. There’s no shortage of evidence to prove this, but this text from my buddy who works in venture capital should give you a sense:

So let’s say we have the product ready to go. Now we have to launch and grow our user base and achieve sufficient network effects to give our product a chance at monetizing and evolving into a viable business. This will look like some version of spending an extraordinary amount of time, money, and resources on acquiring, onboarding, and retaining users.

Thousands of products make it this far, only to fall by the wayside after failing to capture lasting user attention. Many have a viral moment, fewer have a good run for a few years, but nearly all fail to capture lasting user attention or sufficient growth to stay in the top 100 on the App Store or hold a place in the cultural Zeitgeist that make them viable long-term. These are the few winners who dominate our lives: TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat - you know, the big boys.

The list of apps that have fallen by the wayside is long and cuts across every social vertical imaginable: some of my favorites include Vine (short-form video), YikYak (anonymous posting), Poparazzi (anti-social social media), Dispo (photos), Meerkat (live streaming), Google+ (social network) to name a few.

Then, even if we succeed in the above over the course of several years and plenty of blood, sweat, and tears that I’ve boiled down to a few sentences, we have to worry about our biggest challenge of all: building a sufficient moat that can survive competitors and copycats, many of which are bigger, better resourced, and better funded in a crowded and cut-throat environment.

We will have to do everything in our power to combat the threat of second-mover advantage - the competitive edge a company has when it enters the market later than other companies. Read: having your entire product copy+pasted as a new feature into an existing social product from one of the big boys.

Second-mover advantage is the competitive edge a company has when it enters the market later than other companies.

As Pablo Picasso famously said: “good artists copy, great artists steal”. I suppose Picasso would consider Big Tech to be some of the greatest artists of all time…

Second-mover advantage is neither new nor going away (it’s actually growing)

There are countless examples of social media apps copying features from one-another, but Snapchat Stories, Clubhouse, and most recently, BeReal are strong case studies:

Snapchat Stories

Snapchat launched one of its signature features, Stories (ephemeral 24 hour posts) in October 2013. Instagram copy+pasted Stories less than 3 years later in August 2016 after failing to acquire - and then kill entirely (with a failed rival product called “Poke”) - Snapchat:

“Stories were a massive hit for Instagram, and Snapchat, which could not yet match Instagram’s scale, took a big hit. Growth began to slow noticeably after that Instagram update.” - Nick Routley, Visual Capitalist

Fast forward 10 years later and Stories has become a table-stakes feature for seemingly all major social apps - including TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn, to name a few.

Though Stories proved critical to the product’s growth, it was not the primary or even the most popular feature on Snapchat. The same cannot be said for other social products…

Clubhouse

Clubhouse launched in March 2020 and allows users to speak and listen-in on live group conversations. After going viral, in part thanks to people stuck at home due to the pandemic, competitors were quick to jump on the bandwagon:

“Twitter now has Spaces, Facebook has Hotline and Spotify has Greenroom. Amazon is also working on a Clubhouse competitor” - Sam Shead, CNBC

Twitter Spaces, launched just 9 months later in Dec 2022 with near-immediate success, effectively defeating Clubhouse (and other competitors) and leaving it a (mostly) barren wasteland. Twitter’s sheer network effects of hundreds of millions of users, combined with a user-friendly experience, allowed it to effectively render Clubhouse obsolete.

The twisted irony: Elon Musk, an early adopter of Clubhouse who helped bring it into the limelight, now owns Twitter, the company that controls the product that led to Clubhouse’s demise…

While Clubhouse’s rise and fall was quick and dramatic, not all battles are so quick and decisive…

BeReal

BeReal launched in 2019 but didn’t rise to mainstream popularity until 2022, largely driven by its fast-growing Gen Z-dominant user base. BeReal asks users to post an unedited photo once per day via a push notification. The app snaps a photo from both the front- and rear-facing camera of a user’s smartphone at the same time. Users have 2 minutes to snap the picture upon receiving the notification. Users are only able to see their friends’ BeReal photos once they they have taken one themselves for a given day.

It is now increasingly common to see a group of people in the same geographic area all pull out their phones and snap a selfie at the same time - stick around Washington Square Park in NYC for a day and you are bound to see this daily ritual unfold.

The app is truly unlike any other social app before it thanks to a mixture of novelty features (dual-camera), usage mechanics (create to view), and “anti-social social media” ethos (one photo a day, no editing).

BeReal was #1 on the App Store in July ‘22 and boasts 73M+ MAUs as of Nov ‘22. Unsurprisingly, TikTok has launched its answer to BeReal, TikTok Now and The Information has confirmed that Snapchat and Instagram “have also released and tested dual-camera features” too.

Of course, copying and imitation are to be expected

Let’s not forget - there’s a healthy debate to be had about how many features one social app can successfully jam into a single experience vs. focusing on the ones that made it popular initially (looking at you, Instagram). But it is clear that even those who are the victim of second-mover advantage will inevitably “pay it forward” themselves. This is part of the game - and while Meta is the most shameless about leveraging its second-mover advantage, Snapchat and TikTok are no stranger to it either.

“It’s become even more clear that social media executives find some of their best ideas by copying rival apps, from giants like TikTok to upstarts such as BeReal” - Mahira Dayal, The Information

To be sure - adapting to changing macro conditions and emulating ideas and features can often be a strategic, if not necessary, business decision. TikTok’s meteoric rise over the last few years demonstrates that interest-based short-form, user-generated video content is the dominant new social media format- and Instagram (Reels), YouTube (Shorts), Snapchat (Spotlight), even Netflix have followed suit.

Remember when Facebook popularized the “news feed” back in 2006 and the “like” button in 2009? If you ask most people the first time they “liked” something they will probably answer with Facebook or Instagram. The “like” button can now be found on pretty much every social app in existence today, it’s even an emoji on every smartphone keyboard. But you don’t see people accusing other apps of stealing/copying the “like” from Facebook.

The same goes for new gaming formats like Battle Royale modes popularized by Fortnite, or even the basic structure of a live stream with a video player on the left-side of the screen and a comment feed on the right-side of the screen made popular by Twitch and YouTube.

There’s also a case to be made that some new products may be better features than they are standalone products as Twitter Spaces decisive victory over Clubhouse has demonstrated. The addition of Spaces to Twitter is regarded by many as the most significant change to the app in years - myself included.

And like art, on some philosophical level everything is a remix/rendition of- or inspired/impacted by -something that came before it on some level. It’s hard to imagine a world where BeReal could exist, much less succeed, with its “anti-social social media” ethos if people hadn’t become burnt out from a decade of Facebook and Instagram first.

“Instagram is the worst social media network for mental health and wellbeing, according to a recent survey of almost 1,500 teens and young adults” - Amanda MacMillan, TIME

But while TikTok may have a thriving community of over 1 billion users and be able to stave off Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat Spotlight for now, not everyone (read: effectively no one) has the resources of ByteDance -the largest privately-owned company in the world - behind them to fight it out.

Copying a community is much harder than copying a product feature

Snapchat, BeReal, and Clubhouse all faced the same enemy: incumbents much larger than themselves with existing network effects that made it unpleasant for users to try new products and easy to stick around and try a similar/replica version on apps they already use. After all, why would I bother to download a new app where I have to start from scratch and re-follow all my friends when I can do the exact same thing in an app I’ve already been using and established myself on for years?

And yet, despite this challenging environment, new and innovative products with legs to stick around continue to emerge:

Snapchat has 300M+ DAUs and is no longer a small startup but one of the big guys, too.

BeReal is wildly popular and has created a category-defining new social product.

Clubhouse is.. still used by some communities…

And while it’s easy to copy features, doing so does not guarantee success - especially for the most innovative and differentiated products like BeReal and TikTok.

Instagram can ship a MVP of Reels rather quickly, but getting its users to try a new behavior amongst all the other features they’ve jammed into one app is hard to do well - and comes with its own risks as Instagram learned the hard way in 2022. Pivoting your entire product to focus on short-form video (Reels) after a decade of being a photo-feed app is difficult and risky.

As a senior TikTok executive once said to us on an all-hands call (I am a former ByteDance employee) shortly after Instagram launched Reels - they can copy our features, but they cannot copy our community. In other words, Instagram can rip off TikTok’s core features - namely a video editor and algorithmic, interest-based video feed, but the best original content is still made by creators on TikTok (and gets distributed to other social networks like Instagram).

This helps explain why so much of the early content on Instagram Reels featured the TikTok watermark- creators were creating content natively on TikTok, then re-uploading to Instagram Reels. As a former member of the TikTok Product and Distribution Partnerships team, I learned about the importance of the watermark found on every TikTok video added - no matter where a video was posted or re-posted, it would always be clear it originated on TikTok.

To illustrate this point further - Instagram Reels launched in August 2020- it’s no coincidence that TikTok launched the “It Starts on TikTok” campaign that same month.

Building a community of active users around a product, therefore, is much harder than building a clone of the product itself. This is good news for those interested in building new social products.

But just because copying and stealing is to be expected does not mean it is ethical or that we should not try to improve the conditions for new ideas and talented people to succeed. The question we should be asking, then, is “what can be done to make it easier for new entrants to get would-be users to try their products? And what barriers can be lowered or removed to enable these products to find and build communities around them?”

Social media companies serve business interests above users

If you’ve gotten this far (or you skipped ahead) here is a recap of (some of) what needs to go right for your new social product to succeed and the asks you have to make of a potential new user:

At least these 3 things need to go right for your new social product to succeed:

1. Build an incredible product - really hard 😢

2. Acquire enough users to achieve sufficient network effects - risky, expensive, resource-intensive 😫

3. Do steps 1 and 2 quickly enough that you can establish a moat around your user community before a competitor with an established user base takes second-mover advantage of you 🤯

   Think about all the things you are asking a new user to do to try your cool new product:

   Download the app/visit the site

   Create an account and fill out your account details/profile

   Follow other users and get them to follow you back

   Create a post and engage on the product

The creators who have large followings and could be the most useful for growing your new product are the same creators who are most “sticky” to the social products they already use- because the time, effort, and cost of “starting over” and achieving the same level of success on a new application increases with your follower count. One public figure trying a new social product can generate enormous buzz- just ask Clubhouse after Elon joined as a user and broke the 5,000 person room limit.

So - why is it the case users can’t bring their followers from Instagram to TikTok so easily? Surely most creators would enjoy the experience of trying new social products if the costs of doing so were drastically reduced?

The answer is actually fairly straightforward 🤑

TikTok, Meta, Twitter - really every social media app we are familiar with - are all fundamentally powered by the data they capture on their users. Some liken data to “digital oil” - a resource that is both valuable, and closely guarded. Most major social media companies operate on the same fundamental business model:

• Social media sites collect data on users that they sell to advertisers to monetize

• The more time a user spends on an application, the more (and better) ads that can be served to them

• The more data these companies collect about their users’s habits, the more revenue they can generate from ads

• Therefore, their primary incentive is to maximize the amount of time users spend on their applications and to capture as much attention, the most valuable finite resource, as possible

This is not to say social media companies don’t care about users - they have to create a compelling experience in order to retain them. It is to say they do not want to share their most valuable asset, the data they collect on their users, beyond what they absolutely must. Do you think it was TikTok’s idea to include a link to Instagram on user profile pages? Or a demand from users they could not ignore without fear of losing them?

So one answer to the question “what can be done to make it easier for new entrants to get would-be users to try their products?” is to allow users to take their followers with them from one application to another and reduce the cost of trying them. But so long as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat own and control the data their users generate on their platforms - including the data on who follows who - their “social graphs”, this will never happen.

In order for users to be able to port their followers from application to application, the social media companies of the world will either have to come together and agree to share data with each other, or users will have to find a way to take ownership of their own data and relationships with their followers.

Both of these outcomes may sound far-fetched, but the latter is much closer than you think- and leverages a new technology, the blockchain, to do it. More on that in part 2…

Indulge me for another moment and let’s think about what it might look like if social media products were optimized for their users rather than the companies that create them.

Setting the stage for a new, user-first social media environment

It’s clear that traditional social media products optimize for business priorities over user needs when the two come into conflict. But what would it look like to reimagine social media from the ground-up? What if..

…instead of creating a new profile for each social application you had one profile that worked for all of them?

…instead of asking your followers to re-follow you every time you join a new application, they only had to follow you once to follow you on all of them?

…trying new social applications was as simple as just signing in?

A world like that would help founders be better-positioned to tackle the second-mover advantage problem and increase the chances of their product succeeding:

1. The time/effort cost for users to try out new applications would be substantially reduced. The ask of your would-be users to try your new social product substantially more attractive. “Just log in!” is a lot more palatable than “just take the years of energy you’ve invested in Instagram and do it again for my new product (that very few people are using right now)!”

2. User acquisition cost would be drastically reduced. Much of the time, money, and energy that would be spent on getting users to download, onboard, follow, and engage could be re-allocated to focusing on building community and improving the user experience and product feature set.

3. Applications would compete for more-niche but highly-engaged groups of users. Products could serve and optimize for smaller groups of passionate users and curate the experience for them. Kevin Kelly’s theory that a creator need only 1,000 true fans, rather than widespread appeal, to make a living off their creations, could apply to products as well as the creators that use them.

More on that later….

Conclusion

…but for now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this primer on the social product development environment, the important challenge that second-mover advantage presents in it, and the problems it creates for both users and app builders.

Tons of talented people dedicate their careers and take on substantial risk to help users by creating innovative, new products and social applications. I believe that many people have an interest in trying these new products and would enjoy using more of them if it were easier to do so.

In order to imagine a new kind of social landscape, we need to first understand the problems with the existing one. In part 2 we will explore what a re-imagined user-first social media landscape might look like, the players trying to bring it to life, and the challenges to achieving that future.

One last thing

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! This is the very first long-form piece I have ever written and published. When I sat down to write it, I expected to write a few hundred words, but found myself enjoying the process so much that, ~3,000 words and several revisions later, I realized I wouldn’t even get to the main topic until a part 2!

My new year’s resolution for 2023 is to create more - videos, articles, photography, and of course, some AI artwork.

Special thanks to Adam Levy, my friend Avery, and my dad for helping me edit and refine this piece.