The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 33 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dash: TikTok's strength lies in disregarding privacy and conventional rules
“Probably a disregard for privacy and conventional rules.”
Dash: TikTok's 2019 Ad Spend on Facebook and Snap Cannibalized Their Users
“The ad targeting at this point in 2019 had gotten so granular You could actually get to, like, a city level, a user demographic level, and TikTok leveraged all of that. And Facebook and Snap all benefited because they saw tons of money coming in in the form of…”
Most startup sellers should focus on closing one offer, not negotiating
“And really very few companies are in the position of fielding multiple offers. Your goal is really to optimize, to get an offer and get it over the line. And I think oftentimes entrepreneurs forget that.”
Dash: Term Sheets and LOIs From Tech Giants Mean Very Little
“Term sheets and LOIs, even from some of the largest companies in the world, Mean very little. I think oftentimes entrepreneurs can get really excited by it, but generating those is not very difficult for a large company to do.”
Dash: Reddit community consensus is more trustworthy than friends' opinions
“People actually weigh in, and it's become so trusted, because the aggregation of the community and the community actually giving it weight on what is valuable and not, is more trustworthy than necessarily what your friends think about something.”
Dash: Early Dubsmash had poor retention of about five percent after 30 days
“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.”
Dubsmash cut team from 40 to four and moved to NYC
“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…”
Dash: Dubsmash shut down major international markets during dance pivot
“We kicked out, we shut down markets. We literally shut down markets in places like India or in other areas.”
Dash: Dubsmash dance challenges directly drove rap song virality on Spotify
“We started to see rap songs starting to become actually viral on, on Spotify as a result of this.”
Dash: Threads rigged the platform in favor of established Instagram creators
“And I think the challenge here with threads was, on day one, if you're completely porting over the graph, it's very hard for someone to suddenly say, hey, now I'm gonna, I wanna start from zero and become really large on threads. Because already the game is ri…”
Suchit Dash: Connecting users around content vectors holds untapped potential
“And I think people, and actually oftentimes products, take sometimes lazy approaches to say, well, we need people to connect, so let's just make sure to put in a You know, a Facebook connection in here, or an address book connection in here, and actually more …”
TikTok spent Dubsmash's entire $7M bank balance every week
“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”
Dash: ByteDance Used Chinese Revenues from Douyin to Buy US Market
“I think they did it at a scale leveraging all of the revenues that they had gotten in China already via Dao Win and To Tiao and actually leverage that to really buy out the U.S. Market.”
Dubsmash Was Saved From a Data Breach by Cyber Insurance
“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.”
Dash: Facebook is an execution machine, not a copy machine
“No. I think they're an execution machine.”
Dash: Self-consciousness over voice hinders asynchronous video adoption
“Humans hate the sound of their own voice. There's a reason why we don't send asynchronous videos to one another. It's because whenever you're playing a video back to yourself, you kind of cringe at your own voice.”
Dash: Dubsmash offloaded video hosting to WhatsApp and iMessage to save cash
“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 Gained 1M Brazil Downloads in a Day After Neymar's Post
“Neymar posted a dub smash. We saw a million downloads on Brazil in a single day.”
Suchit Dash: Lip-Sync Products Are Weekly Party Tricks, Not Daily Habits
“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.”
Dash: Dubsmash's 30-day retention jumped from 5% to 35% post-pivot
“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.”
Dash: Dubsmash maintained 20% user retention after 12 months
“And after almost 12 months, we saw about, literally about 20% of the users still sticking around, which is crazy to see.”
Dash: Creator monetization behaviors cascade down to micro-creators with 50 followers
“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…”
Dash: Apple Privacy Changes Made Buying Massive App Growth Much Tougher
“I think the targeting capabilities after what Apple has done has gotten reduced dramatically, so I think it would be much tougher, but If you spend that much money, maybe it's possible.”
Dash: Tech M&A Requires Product Leader Buy-In, Not Corp Dev
“Look, with technology platform companies, you have to really connect with the product leader or the CEO. It's not really ever with the corp dev team or the business development team.”
Dubsmash Avoided Shutdown by Negotiating an Acquisition Breakup Fee
“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.”
Dash: Video feeds inherently constrain ad inventory compared to text feeds
“Yeah, look, I think Adam is right in that that dynamic generally exists with feed oriented products.”
Dash: United Airlines leads iOS product strategy and mobile customer tech
“What United has done over the past few years has actually really been at the forefront of any new iOS feature with kind of their live action bar notifications, messaging, and actually has built a really robust kind of Tech stack to actually facilitate that.”
Dash: Dubsmash team built three failed applications before finding success
“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.”
Dubsmash founders decided in January 2020 to sell the company
“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.”
Dubsmash Endured Two to Three Failed M&A Processes Before Reddit Deal
“Openly we went through sort of almost two to three failed processes until we found a successful process with Reddit.”
Press Report Prompted Reddit's Initial Outreach to Acquire Dubsmash
“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…”
Dash: Dubsmash intentionally avoided leaderboards to protect new creators
“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.”