📽 Snap. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The past generation of social apps won the market through a playbook: - building big networks with feeds for discovery - creating a followers/status competition for engagement - bringing together creators and audiences - monetizing with ads - supporting photo, text, video

We love AR, but new entrants need to be able to differentiate meaningfully from existing platforms who are able to simply add more AR features to an already captive audience. While the widening of access to AR technology via existing channels (e.g. extensive filters) has been helpful in driving mass market adoption and familiarization, it’s also be... See more

One of the biggest tests for Snap will be figuring out a monetization model beyond advertising. No one has cracked this outside of China yet, and Snap’s messaging network of close friends makes it possibly the best positioned to do so.

For example, the next writing platform I am paying close attention to these days is Substack. Substack is aiming to be the “social” writing platform for paid newsletters. The reason I say “social” is because, unlike true social platforms where the purpose is to browse and scroll, Substack actually operates much closer to a tool for writers rather t

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