Hey everyone - I've written my first long-form thought piece and released it on Mirror.xyz, please consider giving it a read! My new year's resolution was to write more. My goal with this piece is to help people understand the nature of the current web2 social landscape and begin to question what role we all play in it. This is a prerequisite to understanding what @lensprotocol is all about, and something I talk a lot about with people practically every day.

I hope you like it!

Second-Mover Advantage and Why It’s So Damn Hard To Build The Next Big Social Media App

mirror.xyz/bradorbradley.eth/bncB4C2jq9SpR6OhfE-0FYonPB9fNPnNrreo0WSVrRI

Here's a quick teaser:

Why is it so hard to make a successful new social media product in 2023? Why do a few apps come to dominate our daily lives while so many more never even make it to the Top 100 App Store?

New web2 social products need to succeed at these 3 things: 1. build a great product (hard) 2. scale your users (expensive/risky) 3. survive second-mover advantage from Big Tech copy cats (seemingly impossible) It's never been a scarier time to build a new social product

There's no shortage of examples of Big Tech hindering growth (or killing entirely) newcomer social apps by shamelessly copying them:

@Snapchat stories >> @instagram stories

@Clubhouse >> @Twitter spaces

@BeReal_App >> @tiktok_us Now

And yet, some newcomer apps are able to still create entire new categories of social products - like TikTok and most recently, BeReal b/c of the robust communities they establish early on It's easier to copy features than communities, and that's good news for newcomers

What conditions are necessary for a social app environment to enable more of these new communities and products to flourish? In order to imagine a new kind of social landscape, we need to understand the problems with the existing one

But more on that in pt. 2