Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. Super cool. It’s now in spring of 2015 when they realize this is happening. Because growth has been slow, they decide on a couple of things. One, we need to make a decision and go all in on a particular use case, like classic enterprise software crossing the chasm-type problem of you have a broad platform that ultimately will be useful for lots of different things, but in the beginning you have to have one very specific use case to knock down that first bowling pin of why people are going to use the product. They realized that they need to have one killer feature that they really prioritize in the app. This is where a confluence and of a bunch of things come together. They changed the onboarding flow to make it clear that Musical.ly is really great at helping you create lip sync videos. Two, they then start sending users regular notifications, like daily notifications with challenges of lip sync videos that they can create using the app. This starts driving people to keep coming back. People are coming back and consuming content but this starts driving people to come and create content on a more than a weekly basis. This is the origin of challenges that ultimately the Yeehaw Challenge would be one of the biggest stuff that would help drive Old Town Road, but that’s still to come. And then the product model is super cool. If you think about Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, even Snapchat, all the successful Western social networks up to this point, the content that you see is based on who you follow. When people log onto the app and create accounts for the first time, who are they follow? Ben and I were chatting before the show, we’ve been paying with TikTok over the past couple of days and Ben here were like, “I went in, I followed a bunch of my friends and none of them have any videos.” On TikTok and on Musical.ly, before that it didn’t matter. This is what they take from Kuaishou back in China. Because the content that the app surfaces for you is based on an algorithm of what it thinks you’re going to like completely regardless of who you follow. When you’re a new user onboarded for the first time, it prioritizes content that you have no connection to. That makes it super different from other apps but also this incredible opportunity. Yeah. It’s about finding the content fit with your interest, not the person fit, like a person that you know, and not your own perceived content fit. It’s not like I would tell you that I like SciFi. What’s actually become quite clear to me from TikTok is what TikTok has learned. I like prank videos and I like extreme sports things. I’ve been using TikTok for a year and didn’t follow anyone and I followed people this week and didn’t improve my experience at all. It’s still the same stuff from people who I’ve never met that is just very well-tailored to me at this point. Totally. Once they make this changes in the Spring of 2015, the apps just takes off like a rocket ship. Two months later, on July 6, it’s number one in the US iOS App Store. Since then, Musical.ly and then its successor, TikTok, has never fallen out of the top 40 apps, which is pretty incredible. This is the beginning of the rise that puts it not just onSnapchat trajectory, but now well beyond to Instagram and even potentially bigger. There’s a really great talk that he did, Greylock and our friends at GGV, main venture investors in Musical.ly. There’s a great talk that Alex does with Josh Elman at a Greylock product event that’s on YouTube. We’ll link to it in the show notes; you should definitely go watch it. He talks about the philosophy behind this product decision and how it leads to Musical.ly really having a chance to become a social platform instead of just a utility. Remember we talked about Vine. Dubsmash was out there at this point in time. There are a bunch of other competing apps, but what is it about Musical.ly that makes it special, it’s the Ruth B story from Vine. It’s allowing somebody who’s a nobody, who’s brand new to the platform, doesn’t have any special advantages like a celebrity or an influencer, they’re just somebody who has talent. If they put that quality content on a platform because of this recommendation algorithm, platform’s able to find it, surface it to a bunch of people, and make those creators who actually have talent really successful. That’s what this becomes over time, and what TikTok has become is this really interesting two-sided network effect of a creator side and a consumer side, of which there’s a lot of overlap, but they’re actually pretty different. It’s a lot more like YouTube than it is like Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook. On the creator side, even more than YouTube, really what it is, is it’s like a digitization of American Idol or America’s Got Talent, which is you’ve got these people who have aspirations to show their talents, whatever it is, whether it’s extreme sports videos, or comedy, or singing, or music. They believe that the platform, even if they don’t have a following today, if they make something great and they put it on the platform, there’s a chance that they’ll get discovered.…

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