Pierce: Replicating friend messaging mechanics for brands gives platforms immense power
David Pierce · a16z Podcast | Messaging As the Interface to Everything · Jan 2, 2019 · at 11:18
David Pierce, senior writer at Wired, discusses why WeChat's expansion from peer-to-peer messaging to brand interactions succeeded where other apps failed.
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“If you go where people are already talking to their friends, and then you just, like, replicate that mechanic, but you're talking to something other than your friends, and You can go anywhere.”
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Pierce: US apps attempting WeChat-style social discovery have all failed
“I can't think of an app in the U S that's anything like that. And everything that has tried to do even pieces of that has kind of failed.”
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“Facebook Messenger, which is probably the closest US analog to WeChat because WeChat in the US is nothing like WeChat in China, which is really interesting, but Facebook Messenger has this payment backbone. They have sort of an app store. It's not quite the sa…”
Pierce: Social networks force users to play curated, performative personas
“Social networks kind of necessarily become performant, right? Like, you're playing some sort of character, whether it's business character on LinkedIn, or you want to seem like you have a really fun life on Instagram, or, you know, your kid is adorable on Face…”
Pierce: Super-apps are highly resilient against partial-feature competitors
“It's really hard to unseat because if you're doing 12 things well and somebody comes along and does, you know, six of those things, even if they do all six better, you're not going to leave the thing that does 12 things well.”
Pierce: Mobile devices are the sole internet access point in China
“For so many people in China, the mobile was and is their only access to the internet.”
Pierce: Retailers resisted Foursquare's physical store push due to adoption doubts
“I remember Foursquare tried to do this forever ago, where they were like, they tried to put the symbols in every store, and then half the stores were like, well, we don't know if you're going to take off, so they didn't Play along.”