Lessons from Musically (which became TikTok in America) about growing a new, viral social platform
Lessons below 👇👇
1/ Human Nature
They originally built an app for short-form educational content but realized that people just want to be entertained, not educated.
As @nikitabier often alludes to, people just want sex, money, power, or fame.
2/ Feedback
They collected tons of feedback from users. Putting power users in WeChat groups, sharing wireframes with these users, a prominent feedback button, etc
3/ Community Building == Country Building
- First, they centralized “wealth” to a few top creators so they became role models
- Then, they spread the wealth so that small creators believe they can become “wealthy”
@gregisenberg tweets about community building like this a ton
4/ Focus => Breadth
They started out very focused on dancing videos to gain initial traction and find PMF. Then they opened up and started encouraging other types of videos which allowed the platform to explode in growth.
5/ Come for the Tool.
- They used a lot of growth hacks to get early traction (really long App Store name with lots of keywords)
- They initially made it really easy to make videos and share externally (with a watermark of course).
6/ Stay for the Network
But then people started watching videos on Musically (in order to export the video to share on other platforms, you had to post it on Musically)
Fame is not enough. Creators need to be able to monetize or else they will leave for a platform where they can (which is why @pdavison and the @joinclubhouse team have focused on this so early)
8/ Getting Along with the Music Industry
Music on Musically (and now TikTok), is not the end product. So they aren’t competing with record labels like Spotify is. In fact, TikTok helps these labels by giving their songs distribution.
I was inspired to dive deeper into Chinese companies after reading @patriciamou_ and @ruima piece on Duoyin.
Let me tell you about my favorite app growth strategy of all time. The app launched almost 4 years ago, was purchased and shut down 3.5 years ago, and yet I still bring it up almost weekly.
That app was "tbh" which was built by @nikitabier and team.
1/ What was tbh
tbh was an anonymous polling app for high schoolers (though I’m guessing @nikitabier would say it was a dating app). It was bought by FB for ~$30M in 2 months. My team at Zynga tried to both buy and copy them. Neither worked lol.
2/ Finding Friends
When you signed up, you would select your high school and give permissions to access your contacts. Then they would suggest friends in this order:
- Contacts (Number of shared phone numbers then alphabetical)
- Friends of Friends
- Same School