Why is growing a consumer social app hard?
A functioning app is a necessary condition, but one you have 100% control over. It is not sufficient. You then have 4 difficult problems to solve—at the same time. In increasing order of difficulty:
Awareness
Onboarding
Retention
Interesting and entertaining content
Awareness
How do people know about your app?
Also known as distribution. This is hard, for people who are naturally more building-oriented. It's almost always hand to hand combat early on. Good essay on the topic:
https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-9-notes-essay
Onboarding
How much friction to get started?
Congrats, you got someone to hear about your app. How easy is it to go from hearing about it to getting set up? How many steps? Can they do it on their phone, i.e. immediately? What is the first screen they see after a successful sign up? How are you building habit?
Retention
Does the person come back?
They've downloaded the app, signed up and used it for 2 minutes. They close the app. For most apps, 50% of people never come back. Do you have their email? Do they push notifications enabled? Did you think a web-first app without any contact method is going to retain?
Interesting and entertaining content
Your app's energy source today and every day, forever.
Is it getting less interesting? People will just switch over to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or Twitter for an endless stream of algorithmic content. (People love algo feeds despite stated preference.) If you have a growing and sufficiently large pool of interesting and entertaining content, however:
Retention — people will stick around for the content
Onboarding — they will jump through rings of fire for it
Awareness — they will hear about it from friends
Your app — can be rough around the edges
So one big advantage of building on Farcaster is if the network continues to grow the number of interesting and entertaining people and channels—esp. outside of crypto—then your app starts with interesting and entertaining content for free.
1/ Why is growing a consumer social app hard? A functioning app is a necessary condition, but one you have 100% control over. It is not sufficient. You then have 4 difficult problems to solve—at the same time. In order of difficulty: 1. Awareness 2. Onboarding 3. Retention 4. Interesting and entertaining content
2/ Awareness — how do people know about your app? Also known as distribution. This is hard, for people who are naturally more building-oriented. It's almost always hand to hand combat early on. Good essay on the topic: https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-9-notes-essay
3/ Onboarding — how much friction to get started? Congrats, you got someone to hear about your app. How easy is it to go from hearing about it to getting set up? How many steps? Can they do it on their phone, i.e. immediately? What is the first screen they see after a successful sign up? How are you building habit?
4/ Retention — does the person come back? They've downloaded the app, signed up and used it for 2 minutes. They close the app. For most apps, 50% of people never come back. Do you have their email? Do they push notifications enabled? Did you think a web-first app without any contact method is going to retain?
the interesting thing about awareness is it can be related to the interesting content piece as well. i think this is part of the reason why social networks with their own media form factor (insta>pics, twitter>text, tiktok>vidz) are a thing. the two are connected
As a single essay: https://dwr.email/why-is-growing-a-consumer-social-app-hard
this rings very true. been 10 years or so but this was the reason we couldn't break out in the first co i worked at. we solved them in the reverse order (4/3 then sorta 2) and ran outta time bc even if you solve 1, it still takes a long time to actually grow toward sizable numbers (even if MoM growth is strong).
I like the clarity and the breakdown. The same applies to B2B as well. #4 changes to "daily/weekly/monthly utility! "
Cold start is just the start
shouldn't the content be higher on that list? without content you cant have any of the other things.
The content is the hardest thing to do. But you don't have content without solving (to some initial degree) the first 3 items
This is insightful. From over a decade of experience on social media the content would seem to be the driving factor. But in fact there is more behind the idea. A lot of nuance. In what stage you think we are here? Onboarding?
We're doing all of them? Our biggest issue is lack of interesting and entertaining content.
All at once, I guess that’s the only way to grow.
It's also interesting that video is dominating most platforms. It seems to be a minor part of the current content and is there anything developing in that area? It's been a pleasure to see this platform grow as much as it has already. Thanks for your responses.
wouldn’t say lack of interesting content, but more something around the audience. even within crypto, it seems to attract more of the dev/builder side of it — and a few artists like myself —, which is a niche within a niche imo.
this is very true. the problem stems from not being able to discover new interesting profiles as well at times due to lack of channel overlap, spam in channels etc. Perhaps better curated content discovery can help, building sth here around recommending profiles basis tags etc. lets see how it goes..
Well summarized. Yet there's so much that goes into each phase of this like every phase has multiple stages of their own that aren't visible to the end user for sure.
You’ve captured the essence of the challenge well 🤩✨ Have an awesome day