Connor V. Profile picture
4 Apr, 11 tweets, 5 min read
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)

@cdixon talks about “come for the tool, stay for the network” in his awesome article cdixon.org/2015/01/31/com…
7/ Fame => Monetization

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.

Most of this info is from @blakeir awesome summary of @joshelman interview with Alex Zhu and The China Playbook substack (chinaplaybook.substack.com/p/alexzhu)

Read/follow them all!
@patrick_oshag Check out chinaplaybook.substack.com by @tao_h24 if you haven't already. You'll like it

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Connor V.

Connor V. Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @ConnorVO

5 Apr
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
Read 9 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!