
The next (and probably most important) step would be the one that determines the survival of every platform business: how to solve the demand and supply issue?įor platforms to exist, they need a supply of content/ videos/ entertainment/ services/ people…īut supply wont come if there isn’t any demand in the first place.

“When you want to grow early on, you want to be a brush, meaning you have to be very specific… Later you want to be a canvas, and you want all kinds of things to happen on this blank canvas.” The Allied forces decided to take the beachhead at Normandy (France) during World War II, so they could block the Nazi troops from accessing key military sites, and also establish a presence in Northern Europe. Such strategies are not unique to just the tech and business world. Once they had a solid foothold of that niche market, they were then able to leverage it to expand their use cases and branch into related functions (video filters, memes, music, dance and entertainment), expanding their market size almost “overnight”. “If you look at history, a lot of inventions first started with a toy, with things that seem to be irrelevant, but have the potential to become something much bigger.” They then leveraged that direct relationship with their users to deepen the retention and stickiness of their app. Youtube served mainly as a place for people to upload and host their videos, so it could be embedded onto their websites after.ĭouyin and Tiktok started mainly as a niche tool for young teens to use their lip sync features to make cutesy lip sync videos of the latest pop culture music.
IG was downloaded mainly so users could beautify their photos with amazing filters that was new at that time. Like many others before them (Facebook, Youtube, Instagram), Douyin (the chinese version of Tiktok) started off purely as an innocent toy - A tool that others would use to fulfil a function, and nothing more.įB was simply a way for college students to connect and socialize with each other.
