Many friends, entrepreneurs, & VCs warned me… I couldn’t resist.
But there are fundamental flaws with social:
- The Blank Canvas Problem
- Binary Social Connections
The Blank Canvas Problem
When you give people a blank canvas, certain personalities & content are attracted to the empty state. This is great if you’re rich, famous, beautiful & extroverted. If you’re not those things, you can drop some funny memes to stay in the game.
This is where we’re at with modern social. There’s one network that’s changing this paradigm, I’ll explain later.
Binary Social Connections
On current social networks, it works like this:
- Friends are a binary bidirectional connection.
- Followers are a binary unidirectional connection.
However, this isn’t how humans interact with each other. We are a culmination of contextual unidirectional connections.
What I share with grandma is different than what I share with my best friend. Funny thing is, she’s doing the same thing.
Humans are currently solving this by using different networks for different jobs-to-be-done. The explosion of messaging usage is also solving this job-to-be-done.
We began by building a Path 2.0, based around questions to engage the users. Questions are amazing. They’re how we naturally communicate and it solves the Blank Canvas Problem.
For people who like answering questions, it’s the near perfect form of content to drive engagement.
We built questions around text, images, and videos. A standard social network.
Guess what? It’s too much work for people. I don’t blame people, life is busy. Who needs an app dropping me homework every day?
We switched it to selfie video.
Problem solved! Easy to record. Very little typing or writing, just answer a question.
“I don’t like the way I look.” “I don’t like seeing myself on camera.” “Do you have filters?” “Can I do audio only?”
Problem solved. We switched to an audio-first structure.
“I like answering questions for a few days, then I get bored.” “I don’t care to hear anyone else’s opinion.”
Time ran out for us.
What do people want?
They want TikTok. They want instant entertainment of the absolute best quality & relevance to them.
TikTok (whether intentionally or not, I suspect unintentionally) stepped into a Q&A structure when they launched Stitches. It combines the best of both worlds. It allows for a push-based approach (blank canvas) as well as a pull-based approach (questions).
There’s a powerful insight there that I will expand on at a later date, but for now it can be remembered as: TikTok is still crushing it.
What did we learn along our journey?
- Some people like creating, others don’t. Can’t do much to change it.
- People really don’t want much family content, they want enough to feel good about it — but they really want that next swipe on TikTok a lot more.
- Audio is a feature, not a network. Clubhouse won’t be the next Facebook, but every big network will add audio.
- Short-form audio (~5 min) is underserved and will disrupt traditional podcasting from the bottom-up.
What’s next?
We’re working on something new based on these learnings.
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Imagine yourself putting in your AirPods as you head out the door. You open Fathom.
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Don’t listen to much, but a big reader? Check out our text-based free repo of our summaries, you can see that here: https://fathom.community