Dubsmash

“We had two other investments, Triller and DubSmash, that were kind of the same thing, right? And there's no real reason that they didn't succeed. They just didn't.”

“We had a moment where there was a data breach in the company, and with 10 weeks of cash left, and we happened to find that we had insurance to actually save us.”

“Neymar posted a dub smash. We saw a million downloads on Brazil in a single day.”

“The hard part was that we saw the retention really early and it was awful. After about 30 days out of a hundred people, maybe five stuck around. It was more like a party trick than anything else.”

“We were a startup that had just kind of raised seven million dollars. We had the, that was the cash in the bank. They were spending that in like a week”

“We couldn't do things like host video, so we did a bunch of lightweight hacks, like the whole product was a creator app. You could just send a video, and because we couldn't host video because it was too expensive, we just sent it to WhatsApp, Facebook Messeng…”

“DubSmash's itself of doing a lip sync product was not a daily use case at its core. It was a fun party trick. It was maybe a weekly use case.”

“The early team that worked on multiple applications before even landing on DevSmash, so overnight successes are never really actually overnight successes. They were three failed applications that the team had worked on before landing on that first Area.”

“So, interestingly enough a journalist was able to snuff out that two acquirers were actually coming in and thinking about acquiring the company. And, you know, I denied it. As much as I possibly could. And then really the next day I realized, I really don't ha…”

“When we figured out that we were able to negotiate a breakup fee with one of the acquirers that kept us going, otherwise we would have shut down.”

“My co-founders and I on the first week of January of 2020 said we are going to sell the business. And we said, so from that moment moving forward, we were really clear about this was the outcome that was going to happen for them.”

“So for us, we were always careful about ever showing things like a leaderboard or ever showing, Hey, here are the top 10 creators on Dovesmash. We always wanted to make it feel like Dovesmash was accessible and everyone had a shot at being able to be famous.”

“And after almost 12 months, we saw about, literally about 20% of the users still sticking around, which is crazy to see.”

“We'd expanded to about 40 people at this point and had raised our series B. You know, the user base was still large, even if the retention wasn't as strong. And so we realized we didn't have the team to do it, and so we made a really tough choice of scaling th…”

“So the first iterations of Dubsmash as a lip sync product, after 30 days, it was like, out of a hundred people, five would stick around. With this new version, out of a hundred days, almost 30 to 35 would stick around, which was significantly better.”

“We kicked out, we shut down markets. We literally shut down markets in places like India or in other areas.”

“So what we saw was a user with 10,000 followers would say, Hey, I'll promote your account. Just hit me up on cash app for 50 bucks and I'll promote your account. But then we would see that behavior mimicked. So a user with 50 followers would say, Pay me five d…”

“Openly we went through sort of almost two to three failed processes until we found a successful process with Reddit.”

“We started to see rap songs starting to become actually viral on, on Spotify as a result of this.”