Product Growth and Community Lessons from Musically’s (TikTok) Founder
Creating a community is like running a new country
Building a new social media platform after Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat were dominating was said to be impossible. Musically (now TikTok) did just that.
Here are key insights from a 2016 talk between Musically founder Alex Zhu and Josh Elman. He explained complex concepts using simple analogies captured below.
Human Behavior
Alex Zhu observed from his experience starting an education startup that people don’t like to learn. They’d rather communicate and be entertained. It’s easier to build something that follows this human nature.
For Musically, he focussed on teenage kids in the US for a few reasons. They had time, they were creative, they were digital native, and had video making and editing skills.
Participatory Design
Alex was building an app in China for US teenagers. How do you build empathy while being away from your users? They had team members who understood American culture. People who studied in the US and came back to China.
They also involved users in the very beginning. Using WeChat groups — their team had daily conversations with the users to get fully immersed into American teen culture. They shared mockups and wireframes to get feedback.
They made it obvious to the users that they wanted feedback by placing a link prominently. With questions such as:
- “My ideas”
- “Top things I like”
- “Top things I hate”
Distribution
Alex followed a few hacks to get initial traction.
He noticed that if the app name on the App Store was long and stuffed with keywords, this worked back then. The lesson to learn here would be to be curious.
Solve the chicken and egg problem by creating a utility first, and then building a community around it.
Come for the utility, stay for the community
Community
This was by far the best part of the interview. It was an ELI5 about community building combining concepts from Eugene Wei’s status-as-a-service.
Creating a community is like running a new country
Imagine you discover new land. Now you want people to migrate from existing lands. For e.g. America is your new community. Europe is Instagram and Facebook. They’ve existed since a while and their social class has already established.
The reason people will move away from these social networks is if they want to achieve social status quickly.
The new land has to initially have a centralized economy. This economy needs to make a small group of people rich. Others look at this and want to move. Once enough people have moved, you take measures to decentralize the economy and let everyone flourish.
Monetization Ecosystem
First, they came for fame or status. Now they want to monetize.
Monetization on Musically worked differently than traditional ad networks of YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat.
The Musically team drew insights from the Chinese app ecosystem. WeChat made its mark in the payment space in the Spring festival. The Chinese people used to send red envelopes with cash to family/friends. Wechat digitized this gifting behavior and connected users’ bank accounts.
Influencers on Musically monetize the influence and love using virtual goods. This created enough incentive for them and set the Musically engine in motion.
This video was recommended by Suhail on Twitter. The simplicity of his analogies really helped me understand community building, user behavior, and monetization much better.
Here’s the link to the full video. (29 minutes)
That’s it for today. Talk to you soon!
- Kavir
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Originally published at https://thediscourse.co on June 21, 2020.
