The Meerkat-Snapchat Effect
The intriguing showdown happening between Periscope and Meerkat and how all of this somehow relates to Snapchat.
As an avid lover of new products and booming startups, I’ve been following the rise of Meerkat closely over the past month. Since the launch of Periscope, I’ve found myself caught in discussions on the topic anywhere I go. Often hearing comparisons to Snapchat & Poke, I thought I would share some of my thoughts on how the two are related yet not the same.
We live in a great time for startups: the venture capital markets are booming, tech a desirable career, and hey, it’s fashionable. The rise of services like Product Hunt have allowed startups to launch quickly and easily and get immediate feedback from the launch community. While I believe this feedback is incredibly helpful and great for a lot of products out there, there are a special few that can be hindered or even hurt from the wealth of usage and feedback from PH within the tech community.
Product Hunt is an Echo Chamber
Product Hunt, while becoming more diverse each day, has kept and targeted the same type of user — the tech-focused, early adopter, new product junkie. Don’t get me wrong, I love those people and am happy to call myself one of them but, believe it or not, we’re not the people who use products — users do. We will test and play with every single product on the market and believe in its future possibility yet we forget the key metric: who really uses this?
Over the course of a few years, I learned quite a bit from building products with young people in mind. In particular this trend stuck out to me:
Students take a lot to be convinced of a new product, yet upon experiencing first value, they become die hard users and drive viral usage.
That might seem obvious, but there is a stark difference between product people on PH and those in high school. People have begun to compare Twitter’s Periscope (an answer to Meerkat) to Facebook’s Poke (a failed answer to Snapchat). There are some similarities: two incumbents are trying to capitalize on a trend that a small buzzy new startup is capturing. Unfortunately for Facebook, I don’t think they ever had any hope of defeating Snapchat. Evan is simply too good with product and their growth strategy — hooking young users in from the beginning and setting themselves up for the future.
Younger Users vs. Tech Users
I think Snapchat set itself off quite well by convincing college and high school students that disappearing pictures would significantly improve the messaging experience. Not because it had cool features, could send voice messages, or even because it was anonymous, but because it was more human. Ephemerality turned out to be the chord, which Evan struck so brilliantly that is now engrained in how we design products. Humanity focused, natural, flowing. These are the words I and many others think of when designing UX / UI and product.
Young users set the trends of “what’s cool” in mobile. Snapchat wasn’t posted on PH — it was spread across colleges and high schools in CA and beyond, and Silicon Valley big-wigs didn’t take notice until it was too late.
Meerkat has the reverse: students don’t have huge Twitter followings or perfected profiles across social media. It hinges on big followings and big audiences, something that’s foreign to the average teenager. The biggest names in tech are using Meerkat, while I am the only one at my school who even knows what it is. People love Snapchat because it works for everyone. Meerkat, while brilliant, is having a hard time gaining traction with younger demographics. With Twitter’s backing, Periscope can capture that audience, striking a chord with young users when Meerkat cannot.
3rd Party API’s
This one is a bit obvious and has been talked about before but I feel like it needs to be brought up. Don’t let anyone hold the keys to your garden. Meerkat, which harnessed Twitter’s API, pretty much shot itself in the foot by making Meerkat on top of Twitter rather than feeding into it. They’re now in a funny place: the gateway to their traffic and even functionality is currently held and partially closed by Twitter and Periscope. Even if they are able to find users in the youth, they need to move incredibly fast to alleviate themselves from their Twitter crutch.
Polish
As a whole, launching products with a substandard or scrappy UI quickly to get user feedback and learn is fine. Hey, I remember Snapchat from the early days.
Look at that thing. Yes, it’s incredibly ugly (Sorry Evan) but it does UX magically. It successfully gets users to achieve action and get value without being confusing.
Now Meerkat, it works to a certain degree but I just don’t feel like they spent enough time building user discovery for the common user, instead opting to design for someone whose Twitter following includes @rrhoover, @hunterwalk, and @paigecraig. Periscope definitely has room for improvement, but that rant is for another day.
In Conclusion
Periscope will defeat Meerkat in contrast to the way Snapchat thrived against Poke because Periscope has a vision, drive, and cohesive team. The difference is they can reach into Twitter’s deep banks of users and influence. Meerkat doesn’t have these advantages and also faces some pretty big disadvantages, but as always this is Silicon Valley and anything can and will happen.
Oh yeah, hearts are awesome. IMHO, its the new double tap to like. Its almost like realtime applause. Much love.
A huge thank you to Ari Vaniderstine & Nicholas Abouzeid to making this 1000x better. *They are both way better writers than me. Click their names.
