Social networks are some of the most powerful and valuable products in the world capturing a majority of our screen time. From staying on top of the latest news to getting entertained to keeping in touch with friends and family, social apps play a vital role in our lives.
But, there have been very few social apps that have taken off and sustained in contrast to the thousands of attempts worldwide. From the popular YouTuber, Casey Neistat’s Beme, David Dobrik’s Dispo, ex-President of the US, Donald Trump’s Truth Social to the nerdy kids in college dorms — many have tried and still have been trying to build social apps through the years.
I have personally spent the past year building and learning about social apps. And, they are some of the toughest products to build and scale. Infact, building a successful social network is an extremely rare event. It takes tremendous amounts of effort to get them off the ground and it’s an unforgiving grind for the founders trying to build one.
Though building successful social networks is a tough nut to crack, there are a few common themes in all the successful ones. So below, I’ve tried to condense all my learnings to highlight the 5 fundamental factors to building a successful social app.
Finding the right format and the right set of dedicated tools is a crucial first step for social products. For example, there were many photo-sharing apps that came before Instagram. But, Instagram banked on one core insight at that point: The founders of Instagram saw that an app called Hipstamatic - which basically let users add filters to their photos was rising to the top. The founders noticed that this app grew in popularity even though it was a paid service and saw that people were sharing these photos on other networks like Facebook and Twitter. So they built Instagram and allowed users to add free filters and also share photos on Instagram’s network. And in 2010, it was fairly difficult to get photos off your phone and share to other places, so Instagram also made it easy for people to easily share their photos on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. A cherry on the top was a comparatively faster speed of uploading photos than other apps and a clean grid layout to display all the photos. All these little elements contributed to the initial momentum of Instagram and the rest is, ofcourse, history!
In many ways, building a social network is like building a new country/economy. Imagine you discovered a new land. Now you want to build an economy, get people to migrate to your country, and grow the population. To do this, you need to first provide people with a compelling reason to make them leave their already established life and move to an entirely new country. It can be achieved through one of these 2 ways:
Sell “the American dream” to the people in other countries (content creators on other networks realize that a random set of new creators went on to become super-famous through Tiktok. So they now think they should move to Tiktok too.)
Provide an exclusive experience/service that isn’t available anywhere else (disappearing photos on Snapchat, free filters in the early days of Instagram, a directory of all the students from a college in the early days of Facebook, exclusive conversations on Clubhouse in its early days)
In a social app context, why should I ever leave Snapchat or why should a Youtube creator ever leave the platform to move to your new app? These apps get the job done and moving the entire social graph is highly unlikely.
Just as we’ve seen in the case of Instagram, having a great product hook with a unique social graph and a clear utility is crucial for social products. Also, almost all social apps start out looking like fun toys in the beginning — there are no complex algorithms, moderation, or plenty of product features either. They're simple, yet powerful tools that allow creative expression.
Getting the timing right is quite important for social apps. Coming back to the example of Instagram: teenagers always look for ways to look cool and to differentiate themselves from their parents. As Facebook got more popular, there was widespread parental supervision on the platform. Soon enough, using Facebook had become an embarrassing signal for teens and they naturally hopped on to the cool new hip hangout in the town - Instagram.
Talking about a recent example, the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns played a really important role in the rise of Clubhouse in its early days. It definitely wouldn’t have been possible for Clubhouse to get to the top had it launched just a year back in 2019.
For social apps, it’s all about the people on the app. Unlike other products that inherently possess utility, social apps are default dead on arrival and only become useful when there are others using the app. So, when building a social network, it’s important to achieve a critical mass of connected users in the beginning. Essentially, create a small, stable, engaged network that can self-sustain—an atomic network—then likely you can build a second network adjacent to the first one. This could be a single city, college campus, or small beta test at an individual company.
For example, Mark Zuckerberg first built Facebook only for Harvard students and then expanded to other campuses and then opened it up to the world. Snapchat famously grew within the high school segment. Discord was specifically for the gamers community in the initial days. Had Discord started with an undesirable set of users, it likely would not have become what it is today. So essentially, social apps start out in a vertical community, establish a strong network and expand then on from there.
This is more of an art than science. Essentially, vibe for me in a social app context is how people perceive your app and how they feel using it. It’s the sum of a lot of small details IMO: the name, the design, the product positioning, people on the app, and content on the app among others. It might sound not so important on the surface, but it is a trivial component of all successful social apps.
Teens perceive Snapchat as a private, fun, social communications app because of its intimacy-centric design & quirky branding. Another example is that even though Vine was a short video app like TikTok, it was positioned as a “microblogging website” and focussed on attracting existing creators and never gave rise to as many creators as TikTok did from the early days. But, TikTok positioned itself as a short video karaoke app for lip-syncing and dancing and gave rise to a whole new set of creators from the early days. Though there were a lot of other reasons for the downfall of Vine, positioning was one of the important ones.
If you get all of the above right, which is a huge milestone by itself, your app would likely be the talk of the town. The app would always be buzzing, users flock to try out your new thing, servers crash, press reporters call you the next big thing, investors want to be on your cap-table, and there would be a steep increase in spam. While one may only need a small insight and just a couple of people to build the product in the initial days, it takes a tremendous amount of effort after hitting a certain mass of users to scale a network—to counteract market saturation, playing defense against spam and to amplify network effects over time. Even if you’ve got the right product at the right time, if you’re not able to actively keep up the key metrics like the number of sessions per user & retention, the product will likely die and join the graveyard of social apps that couldn’t make it like MySpace, Path, Yik Yak, Friendster, and others.
In this phase of the product, it becomes more important than ever to stay close to the users and make data-informed decisions. A great example of this is the introduction of the Instagram Stories feature. According to the founders, Instagram had gotten worse at the job it was originally hired for by its users—allowing people to really quickly show their friends what they're upto—as people were no longer posting as much as they did in the initial days of the app. And Stories was the evolution they had to make in order to recapture the job people originally hired Instagram for.
There are a lot of developers trying to build a web3 social network in recent days. As stated above, social apps are generally extremely hard to build. Web3 versions of Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube won’t make any difference to the end-user if there’s no strong value proposition other than being decentralized. The value of these giant social networks lies in their content library and the social graph and trying to replace them requires more than just decentralization. Rather, a verticalized web3 social app serving a specific niche (e.g. Farcaster for crypto-curious folks) or a fresh, new social app built on web3 with a completely new content format and social dynamics might work.
Again, social apps are hard enough to get off the ground and requiring users to setup a wallet to use the app and making them approve wallet transactions for repeating actions (e.g. confirming a transaction just to like a post) will further reduce the already low probability of success. It can only be made possible if the decentralization & data portability of the on-chain record is coupled with the seamless experience of off-chain systems.
I've just scratched the surface of what constitutes a successful social app. There are a lot of other things that come into consideration when building a social network. But having said all this, most social apps are born unintentionally and out of accidents.
By and large, innovative products aren’t strategically imagined ahead of time – they’re stumbled upon while experimenting on the go. Instagram was a pivot from Burbn, Twitter spun out of Odeo, Facebook was originally Facemash, BuzzFeed evolved from one of many “for fun” experiments — the list goes on and on. Tomorrow, a high school kid can strike the right idea, break all the rules and still go on to rise to the top with their new creation as a result of luck or timing. Such is the space!
If you are building in the space or thinking about the future of web3 social, I’d love to chat. My DMs are open.
Thanks for reading, have fun!