Build the Weird Thing First

One of the benefits of having built an alternative to Twitter (and then shut it down) is that I get approached a lot on building other alternative products.

In the last few months, folks have reached out with ideas of alternatives to Discord, TikTok, and Instagram.

Usually the proposed playbook is to build the core experience, and then start innovating from there.

This is exactly what we tried with T2: We built the a core Twitter-like experience, and then we tried add new things, like the AI Ideas.

This approach doesn’t work, because your earliest users immediately make a judgement about what your product is … and there is no second chance to make a first impression.

With T2, the initial product looked very familiar, which also made it boring. Not enough people came. Adding a bunch of AI ideas upset our small audience, and we unlaunched them.

Examples of “weird things” are: Musical.ly (later TikTok) and its portrait-mode short-form video. Pinterest had the waterfall feed and a new action with pinning. Twitter had the 140 character limit. Instagram had the square photos plus the filters. Google had the simplicity of the one single search box. Gmail had threading and the 1GB of storage.

“Build the weird thing first.” is how Jason Fried summarized it in an article I can no longer find. Another way to say this is that you should start with your differentiator: Build the thing that makes you stand out, the features that look and feel different. If there’s enough interest in that, your users will always come back and ask you for the mundane table stakes features.