YouSaid · the spoken record

Suchit Dash

lines on the record: 60
first: 2023-09-13
most recent: 2023-09-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This one will be probably a little bit of a zag. United Airlines, most people's expectations when they fly is their expectations are sky high and their tolerance for mistakes are incredibly low. And actually, mistakes always happen in the airline space. 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 tech stack to actually facilitate that. I recently went through this because I had a back lost at United and I tried to go through their normal customer care of calling them and it was a nightmare. But then I used their text message service and got the bag back within 24 hours and color me impressed.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few books. One book is Execution, the Disciplines of Getting Things Done. It's a great manual or handbook on how to drive teams. Start with No, which is a great book on negotiations for the M&A process. I literally scripted out every conversation we would have and kind of work through all the permutations. The last one is wanting, which is a book about the teachings of Renee Girard about memetic theory, which is great to understand the motivations we were talking about. And then the other piece is probably an audio piece, which is a Hans Zinr soundtrack. I mean, I'm obsessed with all things Hans Zimmer.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is tough. We had some amazing investors at Dub Smash, but probably actually Nihal Meta from Eniac stuck with us through and through Thick and Thin, but DubSmash was always a champion, even in some of our darkest days.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a framework sort of listen to what they love, monitor what they do, acknowledge what they hate, and own it if you need.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single best probably product decision was pivoting the whole company of Dove Smash towards this dance challenge platform. I think it was daring. It was bold. It was scary, but it was the right move. We wouldn't be where we are today had we not made that decision. Had we delayed it, we would be out of cash. Really, that was the best possible.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think with new paradigms like video and others, how you can actually elevate the conversations and make it more conversation first is critical. This will require some rethinking and how we think about feed paradigms and feed products, but I think it's necessary for us as we evolve and to kind of skating towards, again, what motivates customers.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I think Adam is right in that dynamic generally exists with feed-oriented products. You know, I think about this at Reddit in a slightly different way. Look, our magic at Reddit is with our conversations. That is what Reddit is known for. If you think about your day to day and how you use Reddit through conversation, people actually find information. They're entertained. They connect with one another to find community. Oftentimes, the largest user base oftentimes will find Reddit because they're querying something on Google and they land on this on Reddit and they find really great answers. And oftentimes people are having robust discussions and conversations and then they go off and form their own community on Reddit. So really that's the central piece. And one of the things that I've thought through is so far all of these feed products have buried the conversations with a single icon that has a small little comments icon and you click on that and that's how you kind of read it.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So interestingly enough, a journalist was able to snuff out that two acquires were actually coming in and thinking about acquiring the company. I denied it as much as I possibly could. And then really the next day I realized I really don't have any leads and I don't know. The pipeline is pretty dry right now. And so I called him back up and said, you know, I think there might be some other folks who might be sniffing around on the same story that motivated the journalist to say, oh man, I got to publish something. And so an article was written there and that was the first time that read it actually reached him.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I view this in kind of two ways. There's the mindset of being an entrepreneur, and there's actually the mindset now as an acquired founder and now an executive at a company. There's a bit of a different mindset as well. Mindset as an entrepreneur, number one, a lot of people talk about focus. We were always really focused on the key problems in making sure that we're trying to find product market.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard for me to say because I think about it in a very binary way. Ultimately, we were successful. The entire team moved over to Reddit. The entire team was working on DubSmash. All of us were really happy Reddit's an incredible culture. And so it was better than I could have ever imagined. And I think things happened for a reason. And so with hindsight, if anything, I wish I had found Reddit earlier in the process. We went through a lot of pain in the early stages with maybe other partners. And I think that that was something that I wish would have happened sooner.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think really the US needs a TikTok, and I wouldn't even phrase it kind of really in that way. I wouldn't even categorize as the US. I think what consumers fundamentally need, and I think what is incredibly valuable, is connecting outside of just their friend graph and connecting around interests. At Reddit, I actually believe that it's a fundamentally better way where users don't leverage their real identities. They connect around communities, they conversate around the things that they're interested in. And I think there's incredible value in that. And you see a different type of conversation that is actually happening as a result of it. The copy of TikTok? No, I don't think that that's really a necessary thing.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than the Duff Sash Journey that we likely would have shut down. But the fact that we were still there in 2020 competing, growing, we were probably the best team on the market with the most institutional knowledge to actually be able to take on someone like a TikTok. And that's why we became very valuable.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, I think, the one thing that we did right at Depp Smash was we were always honest with our investors. We told them whether we had it or we did. When we got into the board meeting with Nico and Danny, we said, look, here's TikTok. Here's how much they're spending. This is a game where either we go and raise $100 million and eat $100 million and even with that, we're unsure if we can compete at this scale. It would be one thing if one American competitor were jumping in like just Instagram. But at this point, we learned it was Instagram jumping in, there was YouTube jumping in, there was Snap jumping in, and there was a slew of other startups trying to compete in the space. So we said, this is the moment that we think it's most likely and most beneficial for us to actually partner on because everyone is thinking about what their lip sync or tick tock strategy is in 2020. Three years before, no one woke up saying, what's my lip sync strategy? There were so many moments.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's in the diligence. And the difficulty is you may have convinced someone, one person in the organization, that this is a good idea. But once the diligence starts, you have many people around the table who are trying to say this is why it's a bad idea. That is a really tough process to go through because you have to do a lot of convincing to so many stakeholders around the table as to why this is a good idea. And oftentimes you're competing against internal projects that are going in the same direction.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Openly we went through sort of almost two to three failed processes until we actually found a successful process with Reddit. What I learned through the process is a couple of things. There's some obvious ones with technology platform companies, you have to really connect with a product leader or the CEO. It's not really ever with the Corp dev team or the business developing team. The second is it can be very isolating. You internalize this up and down, but you've got to stay calm and collect it and not get overly emotional in the process. The third is really 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. They may say, hey, we rarely do this and we rarely give something like this out. But in actuality, the true process happens after the term sheet and the”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a massive emotional roller coaster. And the ups and downs of an M&A process are not for the faint of heart. I was sort of leading the charge on our M&A process. And even what I would communicate to the co-founders would be a little bit watered down. You need them so that you can all continue to motivate each other and their critical pieces for all of us working together on this. But still, you would be up at night hoping that an email was read. You would be sending a text not getting a response and wondering in your mind what's going on is something wrong. All of your sort of like anxieties are elevated in this process. And so that's why I start with it's not for the faint of heart. It requires a tremendous amount of focus to actually really get it over the line. I think it's really unfair to actually put your team through something like this.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sally. They are the buyer at the end of the day, even in the selling process. And when people don't do that, they start trying to negotiate and optimize on things for the sake of negotiating. 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.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally agree Yeah, totally agree. There were a couple of lessons that I think entrepreneurs sometimes forget about this. I think the first is like, I'm going to process are very different than fundraising. They are actually much more emotional than really a fundraising process. And the reason why is because you're not just connecting on the terms of the deal, you're connecting at a values level, at a principal level with your counterparty. You're really connecting and seeing, hey, is the person on the other side of the table actually going to fit into our culture? Do I align with them at a principal's level? Are we philosophically going in the same direction? With the VC, you sort of do that, but you're not working in the same way day in and day out. And I think that's really where M&A processes, in my experience, I had to connect at the emotional level with any of the counterparties to even have a shot at it. The second thing is I would say is from a mindset perspective, you kind of have to go in to say, look, I'm going to be seeding control. Ultimately, we are”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just say one thing that you really need to focus on selling. It's not for the faint of harm. So you need to be 100% committed in dial-in to say we are selling.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We saw our creators getting solicited by these competitors that created an arms race. It created every company started to create a creator fund. And so as a startup with minimal cash, the question is sort of what do you do in that situation? So we opted to say, hey, let's actually use this opportunity instead of raising a ton of money and trying to play in this game. Let's actually go and partner with another company.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, 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. They did it at a scale leveraging all of the revenues that they had gotten in China already via Dow Win and To Tiao and actually leveraged that to really buy out the US market. Also, they spent money in buying musically, which was an established user base and actually leveraging that to convert it into the TikTok product.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were incredibly bold in the amount that they spent. And I think what they were great at was actually doing something that the American players, I don't think, saw coming. You leverage your ad targeting on these American products and actually build up a user base using that mechanism. Something that no one had done before. 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. Facebook and Snap all benefited because they saw tons of money coming in in the form of revenue. But ultimately it was cannibalizing their user base, which they started to realize in 2020 and started to realize we need to actually go after this category.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before. Ultimately, we realized we either need to raise a massive arsenal in a war chest to compete at this space or we need to partner with someone else.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was incredibly unique. Never before had we ever faced a competitor like this who bought market share. We would tacitly maybe competed against the American competitors like Snap and Instagram and others, but it was a game of retention and organic growth. That was the game. It was sort of like who had superior retention? Who was able to drive organic downloads? No competitor had ever bought users at that scale. We, for the first time, saw a competitor taking a very unique orthogonal approach. And we were a startup that had just raised $7 million. That was the cash in the bank. They were spending that in like a week also leveraging Facebook's ad marketplace to get hyper-targeted at the demographic that they wanted to actually bring over, having the content tailored so that when they would arrive, the content was relevant to them. It was a playbook that we had never seen.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as a V1 and what they saw from a viral product perspective was improving. Getting users to download an app in 2023 is really tough. It's not like the App Store was in 2012 where people were actually browsing and trying to discover apps. That is a really, really tough thing to do. I will just say that the team have a tremendous amount of respect for that team. And the team iterates until they will get it. And I think they will continue to take shots on goal and eventually likely find product or could fit in some way, shape, or form. It may not be to the billions of users, but likely they'll find audiences that will find it valuable.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Valuable because when you actually look at a place, what you're really looking for is you don't necessarily care about what your friends think about what this place was and what their taste preferences are. You're actually looking for aggregation of data around whether the place was valuable or not. We see this with Reddit all the time. Reddit is an anonymous network. People actually weigh in and it's become so trusted because fundamentally 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. I think Google Maps as an example and what they're doing is you're starting to see trusted guide, trusted sources and the aggregation of their ratings is starting to become increasingly valuable rather than trying to be like hey connect with your graph here and now we're going to recommend all of where your friends are going. They're actually taking the abrogation of what the community thinks and there's a lot more valuable data into it.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you're actually seeing with location, I've been fascinated with location for a very long time. I actually love the snap product around location there because I think it really actually connects. It's not necessarily your friends, but it's the UGC content that is posted across the Snap map to actually see creation happening across all of the world. I think someone who's doing location actually really well is actually Google Maps. If you're actually starting to see what's happening is what they're doing is they're connecting users to a place and then actually allowing for reviews to actually become increasingly robust there. It is that user to place connection that I think is really, really valuable. I think what was happening is a lot of companies”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Connect around a specific content type or vector that has not been exploited is actually where there's likely opportunity.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think founders don't spend enough time thinking about the structure of platforms as much as they should be. And even investors don't really as well. As an example, I think early days, the first versions of social networks were built around the address book and connecting friends to friends. The second versions were really around users to interests. TikTok was, you don't need to have a follower base. You can just connect to your interests and we're going to just design communities around those interests. I think there's still a ton of opportunity around how do you connect users to location? How do you connect users to conversations? How do you connect users to various other threaded graphs on the internet? 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 Facebook connection in here or an address book connection in here and actually more thinking around how users can actually”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is if you're at the top, but it's not necessarily the case if you're not at the top, so you're rewarding the top 10 or you're rewarding the top users, but you're not necessarily rewarding the newly onboarded users. Or, and I think the challenge here with Rutz 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 going to, I want to start from zero and become really large on threads. Because already.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question. What we found at DovShash was that was definitely the case. We were really careful, though, and we wanted to be very careful about the idea that the challenge with fundamentally influencer networks is it actually stifles Kriich. The problem that you see is that when you gain a huge follower base, you start to actually feel as though there's a moment where when the largest follower of it starts to get so big that unless you have a really great algorithm to give proper distribution for even the up and coming creators, you start to see creator burn. I'm never going to get to 100,000 followers. I'm never going to get to a million followers. And so it's really important for platforms to actually create more of a democratic system in actually growing their user base. So for us, we were always careful about ever showing things like a leader or ever showing, hey, here are the top 10 creators on Dev Smesh. We always wanted to make it feel like DevShash was the”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did. I mean, I think this community was the most savvy community I'd ever encountered. And it goes back to the motivation smash. They were motivated because they wanted to become an entertainer. And it started with many of them beginning the process of trying to actually earn revenue at a really early stage. 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, and I'll promote your account. But then we would see that behavior mimicked. So a user with 50 followers would say, pay me $5 and I'll promote your account. The mimicry of actually influencing to customers was translating down whether you had 10,000 followers or 50 followers. They were so motivated by really being that entertainer and earning cash that it was really we wanted to build tools to make that really possible for them.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's validation at the end of the day that all of this hard work, sweat, and tears, that would be the thing that would motivate me is to say we have finally created a retentive product. We're finally actually resonating with customers. It's really hard because everyone says you want to see the hockey stick growth. We saw it in the reverse direction for a very long time. And that was challenging. And it was really hard in those moments when you see those numbers going down to get motivated. being relentless, continuing to focus on trying to find that product market fit and finally seeing the validation that it was working, it was a feeling like unlike anything else.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And after almost 12 months, we saw about 20% of the users still sticking around, which is crazy to see. What we started to see, which was very elusive in the consumer social space, was the first time seeing a smile curve, was that after those crazy viral moments in the United States, we started to see our numbers really, really decline. But for the first time after seeing this retention, we started to see that the numbers were growing back again. What you see in the charts is actually kind of a smile because the users are starting to come back at that same level that they were kind of in the very, very early.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. So, the first iterations of dub smash as a lip sync product after 30 days, it was like out of 100 people, five would stick around. With this new version, out of 100 days, 30 to 35 would stick around, which was significantly better.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. We kicked out, we shut down markets. We literally shut down markets in places like India or in other areas. We completely tailor the product to this use case. We said, hey, Duff Smash is now a dance challenge platform. You now can create your own account. You can actually post it all on DubShash. You can now create your own audio samples. We started to see this incredible marketplace of audio producers actually uploading audio beats. Dancers starting to take those and create dance challenges, building followings. This was the earliest precursors and many of those started to become very famous actually dance challenges, not only on TikTok, but in other places. We started to see the earliest stages of like stars being born. We started to see rhapsongs starting to become actually viral on Spotify as a result of this. So this was something that we never had any idea that this was even happening. But by focusing it on it and building towards that use case, that's how we started to.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And users in international markets. But that seed caused us to say, let's actually skate towards that. Let's build a product around that use case. That's kind of how we iterated on the next version of Dubshmes.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dub smash had the ability you can upload an audio sound. They would upload their own version of an audio sound of what's called a very specific dance beat or a sped up beat or a dance challenge. So not Arnold Schwarzenegger, I'll be back, but a very specific produced kind of like UGC audio sample. Users then would go and dance to that and create a challenge. They would post it on Instagram and use a very cryptic hashtag to be able to actually gather a community around the hashtag and said goaded and give instructions go to DuffSmesh, find this sound, create a dance video, post it on Instagram, and then be able to see who hits the challenge the best. It was the smallest starting in Atlanta, Georgia. A few users started to use it in this way and it started to really locally grow. And we saw that behavior really early on and said there's something here of a seed of an idea. And mind you, we had millions of still installations.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for zero to one product, you're actually looking for the earliest seeds of validation. What you're really looking for is kind of what users say and how they're using it. And it's important to look at what users do, but what you're really trying to see is not what users are telling you, but really trying to gravitate to what they are doing in a very unique way, how they're leveraging the product in ways that you probably never even imagined. So I'll give you a very tactical example of what happened with us at Dop Smash. We're building this lip syncing product. This thing was kind of working in various international markets. We were randomly trending in India. We then were trying to skate towards building a quotes database. We had all these different ideas. But it was really the sort of Eureka moment happened one day just sitting”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really hard. There's no words to really convey that it's like it'll be fine, it'll be easier for myself. There's sort of this almost irrational optimism that we had that our best days are just ahead, that even though in this time of darkness, there is light at the end of the tunnel and we just need to continue to skate towards there. And without that, there's no way we would have survived. We just had this feeling within us that there was something that was going to be good at the end of the day. Some founders have that, some founders don't. I think you have to have a bit of this crazy, irrational optimism because all of the world is stacked against you. That is really most rational actors would not take that approach.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it was a couple months after we raised our Series B and we told them look, it's pretty simple. It's actually pretty binary. You either have a business or you don't have a business. We didn't have it. And so we said, look, we have cash in the bank. We're going to give ourselves as many shots on goal with consumer internet. And so we've got to reduce our burn. We've got to get out of this super fancy office in the middle of Alexanderplatz. You know, it was depressing to see the sites of 40 desks completely empty. When you look at that visual image, it is really, really sad. But we knew long term this is what was likely going to pay out. And our board was actually very supportive to give them all the credit in the world. They said, look, we believe in you. We know you're going to need time. Time equals money. So let's give as much time as you can to rebuild the company.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That team down from 40 to almost four people, moving the whole company to New York City, and saying, look, we're going to rebuild the team, start fresh, and try it again.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two perspectives. The first was what things were going really well and we were on the tonight show and all these other things, we didn't get too excited. We tried to temper expectations with our team. And we told them, look, we still are struggling on retention. We didn't believe our own pipe or we didn't believe our own bullshit. And when things got really bad, we said, look, we told you. Still need to like work towards this and we got to keep motivating. That's perspective one, which I would say to founders, I think it's always important to live in the middle. Try not to kind of ride the waves because it's unsustainable. But over time, the motivation got to a place where it was really tough and we realized we didn't have the culture to go at it again and build it with the team out in Berlin. We'd expanded to about 40 people by this point and had raised our series B. Look, at the end of the day, the user base was still large even if the retention wasn't as strong. We realized we didn't have the team to do it. And so we made a really tough choice of scanning.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't nail the user motivation. We didn't get users to spend, to shift their time or spend their time daily using the product. That's what every consumer product is aiming to try and do. Packaged all up, really what you're trying to do is get users to think about your product, use your product on a cadence that is daily. We never got that really with this first version of DevSmesh. As I mentioned before, the framework I use is good products make it to your home screen, great products make it into your mind. We just didn't get into their mind. That's okay. At the end of the day, consumer internet is the hardest space to really play in. The batting averages are so low. You got to keep trying, though. And that's the key thing is that we never stopped trying. We said, look, we know we don't have it now, but we have this optimistic view that the next iteration was going to get it. And it was just around the core.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, we were constantly looking at sort of D30, D90, really at the start. It was sort of like, how do we just see any semblance of improvement? Our first sort of area we tried to skate towards was messaging. Said, look, everyone is sending these dub smashes to one another in small groups. Let's build the address graph inside dubs. Let's allow users to connect with one another and send dubsheshes to one another. And I think there are a few challenges with that problem. Number one, Facebook had already really captured the address book graph. It was really hard for users at that time in 2016 to say, let me build a brand new network on this product now. The second is DubSh itself of doing the lip sync product was not a daily use case. It was a fun party trick. It was maybe a weekly use case. Getting them to do that on a daily use case. And this was something we learned. We needed to innovate further on the format itself and actually really find that product book could fit. That sort of second iteration where we”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did, especially in those international markets. The challenge was we knew we didn't have it because we knew the retention number and we were quite intellectually honest with ourselves. And so our focus was not trying to get caught up in the hype. It was let's focus on building the product and getting to that retention mechanisms and starting to kind of really work around that.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In today's world, there are so many more retention mechanism built in from sort of day one, but at that time, because of our constraints, we didn't have enough cash to host the videos. We didn't have any social network where you could connect with other users. You couldn't even actually consume the best upsmash videos inside the product. All of it was purely a creation app. Now, the flip side to that.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, fundamentally, it was a creation app. Today, you could say, yeah, you know, when you look at products like TikTok, there's an incredibly robust algorithm that matches interest to users and it's able to understand your explicit and implicit feedback on the product itself and tailor the content. We had none of that in 2014, 2015. For Dove Smash, it was genuinely just like a weekend hack project and it went out there. The hard part was that we saw the retention really early and it was awful. After about 30 days out of 100 people, maybe five stuck around. It was more like a party trick than anything else. However, the organic coefficient of growth was so high, the install base was growing at such a high rate. It was truly like one of the most viral products that I think the App Store had seen at that time.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ever did that. And so that created this loop that got users to really organically grow. A lot of these lessons now are baked into every consumer product, but at the time they were pretty early in its innovation.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overnight successes are never really actually overnight successes. There are three failed applications that the team had worked on before landing on that first area. And it took those years of learnings to finally get to that first kind of iteration that really resonated and work. So first of all, philosophy of just iterating until you found product market fit. That was the crux of the company. The other piece of it was there were so many constraints on the company at the time. There was very minimal cash. And so what that meant was we could 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's too expensive, we just sent it to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage. And that made it the product really lightweight. That also made inherently a whole viral loop. We had every video with a watermark on the bottom right that said dubsmash.com. We were probably one of the first that actually.”
2023-09-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Dubsmash Memo: Scaling to 43M Users in 10 Days, Why TikTok Was a Competitor Like Never Seen Before, Good vs Great Consumer Products and What Every Consumer Product Needs & The Future of Consumer Social with Suchit Dash · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source