By One Founder's Account, Apps Win Only on Love, Money, or Escape
After failing to make a taste-sharing app stick, a founder argues Facebook won by turning gossip into push-button entertainment.
Medium · So You Want to Build in Consumer Social: A ManifestoIn a blog post reflecting on half a year trying to build an app for swapping recommendations for books, films, and shows, a founder took stock of why consumer social defeats so many teams. Consumers, she wrote, say they would use a product and then do not.
Her conclusion, in her words, was blunt: "Consumers are basic, primal monkeys that only onboard and retain on a product if it helps them get laid, make money, or escape the mundanity of their lives."
As she frames it, a new consumer product is not competing mainly against other startups but against what people already do, and she argues people change course only for one of those three payoffs. Social media, in her view, counts as the third, entertainment, and she argues that entertainment is now far too saturated for another pleasant app to break through.
Facebook succeeded, she argues, because it arrived when almost nothing else competed for that kind of attention, and it offered personalized social interaction in a remarkably efficient form. As she puts it, "you press buttons and get social validation tokens out."
She argues the real problem Facebook solved was gossip, which she calls "the oldest, most evergreen problem known to humankind." People, she notes, have been cobbling together their own ways to gossip since the beginning of time, long before anyone had sleek software for it.
Her test, she writes, is to "see if consumers are already hacking together some kind of DIY solution to solve it." "Other times," she writes, "it is simply not a Real enough Problem that they care to switch."
Questions people ask
What do love, money, and escape look like in real apps?
In practice she means dating and sex, income or career upside, and fun or distraction. Dating apps promise romance, marketplaces and creator tools promise money, and TikTok, games, and social feeds promise a break from routine. If an app offers none of the three, she argues users have no reason to change their habits.
Why does she say entertainment is saturated?
She means that phones already offer endless video, games, group chats, and feeds competing for every idle minute. A new entertainment app must therefore be dramatically more compelling than what people already use. Without that edge, users simply stay where their friends and habits already are.
How was Facebook push-button gossip?
Facebook let people check on friends, share news, react, comment, and collect likes and comments in return. Each tap delivered a small piece of social information or approval. That loop made everyday curiosity about other people fast, personalized, and repeatable.