Musical.ly's Alex Zhu on Igniting Viral Growth and Building a User Community | #ProductSF

Launching a new platform, Zhu said, was like starting a new country: Getting users to move from an established network that had an ossified economy and social classes to a new network requires the possibility of success—the lure of the American Dream. Furthermore, the new social network had to create upward mobility for all users, to “make sure the... See more

Spotify is great, but it’s primarily a single-player experience. Music, on the other hand, is an inherently social experience. Tiktok—originally, musical.ly—figured out how to make music social by licensing music, introducing viral “challenges,” and making user-generated content easier to create, even if they didn’t technically build a social graph... See more