Ben Rubin, co-founder of Meerkat, describes the realization that led the company to pivot away from standalone live video despite having just raised a major funding round.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.5s
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“Within three months after raising fourteen million dollars from Greylock and other investors, we were like, guys, there's no broadcaster attention in the average person, in the 99% who are not celebs, media and news. And because of this, we cannot build an independent company that is sustainable.”
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Standard growth playbooks fail on company-specific retention issues
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Live video is a feature, not a standalone product category
“And we know today that live video is not what we thought it's going to be three, five years ago. It's actually a great feature on top of existing platform that is being used by celebrity media news more often than the next person.”
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Disclosure
Meerkat's broadcaster retention only existed among celebrities and media
“And one of the things that we saw that we had the privilege to see with millions of people using Meerkat is that the retention for broadcasters Only existed in the celebs, media, and news type of users.”
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Synchronous social apps depend on concurrent graph availability
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Opinion
Twitch succeeded by focusing on broadcaster retention from day one
“There is one platform like this. It's called Twitch. Twitch from the get go focused on broadcaster attention.”
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