Discord ignored its Midjourney moment and grew by getting gamers to show up one more day
The hot AI app left no mark on usage charts, so the company chased one more day a month from its gamers instead.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · 90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter SellisFrom the outside, it looked like Discord had just caught its biggest wave. Midjourney, the artificial intelligence tool that turns typed prompts into pictures, was built inside Discord, and crowds were pouring into Discord servers to try it.
Peter Sellis, an early product leader at Snapchat, said the excitement never showed up where it counted. Sellis said, "you wouldn't be able to pick out Midjourney" if you charted Discord's use over time. People were not opening Discord for AI art. They were opening it to stay in touch with gaming friends around the time they played together.
That disconnect became the plan. Sellis argues that for businesses built on networks of friends, growth usually comes from the core, not from chasing a hot new use. The math is simple, he said. One person who uses an app every day equals 30 people who use it once a month, so moving a regular from 10 days a month to 11 or 12 or 13 is monster growth.
In 2024, the team was completely refocused on intentional multiplayer games, meaning friends who plan to play together, even though outsiders insisted there was nothing left to win because every personal computer gamer already had Discord.
Sellis said that assumption was wrong. Discord's voice chat was already near perfect in some ways, but there were still reasons someone stayed silent, used the voice system built into the game, or called a friend another way. By making the app faster and smoother around those moments before and after play, he said Discord drove some of its fastest growth since the explosion of the pandemic years.
He had seen the same pattern before at Snapchat. After a troubled redesign in 2018, the only quarter in which Snapchat's daily users flattened, the company fixed slow performance on Android phones and touched off a growth revival that lasted for years.
At Discord, the payoff was measured in what Sellis called Lness, shorthand for using the app on each of the last seven days, a gauge he credits to Meta. And in his view the focus won back a demanding crowd. He described gamers as the most vocal, critical, and detail oriented users in the world, and he credited asking them to post bug reports on Reddit, no matter how small, and promising to fix them with building the loyalty that still sets Discord apart in its niche.
Questions people ask
Why was Midjourney on Discord in the first place?
In its early days, Midjourney did not have its own app, so users typed prompts to an automated account inside Discord and got images back in seconds. Discord was a natural host because it already let large groups gather around shared interests and watch results appear in real time. Midjourney later added its own website for creating images.
What does it mean to move someone from 10 days to 11 days a month?
It means turning a somewhat regular user into a slightly more habitual one, rather than finding a brand new user. That shift is powerful because daily and near daily users open more sessions, invite friends, and are far more likely to still be around next month. Across millions of people, one extra day adds up to a large gain in total use.
Why are gamers such a tough audience?
Gamers notice tiny delays, glitches, and confusing controls because games punish slow reactions and reward precision. They also compare notes constantly on Reddit, livestreams, and in game chat, so problems surface fast. Companies that fix those complaints in public tend to earn unusually strong loyalty.