Early adoption by young women signals an app's pop-culture potential
Jeremy Liu · 5 months in, Snapchat had only 127 users. Here's how Evan Spiegel found product market fit w/ Jer... · PMF Show · Apr 22, 2024 · at 29:16
Jeremy Liew, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, outlines his investment framework for consumer apps and explains why female adoption is a leading indicator of cultural relevance.
0:00 / 0:05exact quote · 5.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“One of the early indicators for that is that it's primarily used by young women, because I think young women are culture carriers.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jeremy Liu
Liew: Geographic hotspots prove genuine word-of-mouth virality over manufactured growth
“Because all this growth was happening through genuine word of mouth, these geographic hotspots, Were, like, evidence that this is real, not manufactured virality, not invitation driven virality, the virality driven by people, like, sharing it with the people t…”
Snapchat pitched Lightspeed with 50% DAU/MAU, 50% D30 retention, 50% MoM growth
“What I saw was 50% daily active user to monthly active user. Ratio. I saw 50% D-thirty retention. And I saw 50% month-on-month growth on a statistically significant number of users. I can't remember exactly what it was. It was 10 or 20,000 DAUs. And that had b…”
Liew: Disappearing messages reduce posting anxiety caused by persistent social media
“A lot of social media creates this performance anxiety, which means that you don't post. And so like you get this sort of more of a social media perspective with a small number of posters, large number of consumers. And he talked about how the, you know, the d…”
Messaging creates stronger habits than social media due to response obligations
“With social media, there is no expectation that you respond. You can look at it and do nothing, totally fine. Your friend isn't like dude, like, why did you know, why didn't you heart it? Why didn't you, like, no comment? Like, what's going on? If you send som…”
Liew: Chronological Stories was a complete innovation that became industry best practice
“Now everybody does that. Now it's like obvious. It's the new best practice. It was a complete innovation at that time.”
Liew: Reddit is the only major social platform that started male-dominated
“If you think about a lot of, it's not just Snap, Instagram, Facebook, MySpace, they all started with the young female users. Pinterest, maybe older female users. I think Reddit's really the only big social media example that started with a primarily male audie…”