Nikita Bier: belief

Transcript context

…An insight you're sharing there potentially is the reason a company like Facebook isn't amazing at launching completely new product, zero to one stuff, is they might be a little too risk averse and it's hard to talk about stuff that people actually really, really want deeply. Is that kind of the sense there? It's hard to really verbalize some of the things that motivate us as people. There's a tweet I put out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of how I view why people download apps and it's very simple. It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be like WhatsApp, where free texting. And then the other reason is to find a mate, so maybe like Tinder or Snapchat, find love. And the third is to unplug from reality maybe like Netflix or Fortnite. There's a bunch of other kind of subcategories that are very utilitarian like movement, Uber or Airbnb, like shelter. And so I think putting that in a framing document and the particular nuanced reason why people are going to adopt is difficult when you're presenting that to people that are seasoned professionals and care about how something might reflect on them personally. And so that's really difficult inside of a large company. You'd certainly have distribution advantages. If you want to just inject your app into one of the parent apps and get density within a community, you could do that. But that part I think is probably solvable for a startup if you just want to pay for ads. Getting your app into a dense friend graph is overall trivial. As a founder, you should be able to pull it off after enough tries. So that advantage that a big company brings, I mean it makes it easier, but it's not something that I think is something that a founder can't solve for themselves. So an interesting takeaway it sounds like is many people feel like, "I'm going to build a social app." They probably often hear, "Facebook's going to do that. Instagram's going to copy you. Snap's going to do that." And what I'm hearing here is it's not as easy as many people think, that it might be actually a lot harder for them to try something.…

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