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 13 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 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…”
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 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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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: 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.”