What the business is
Threads is Meta's text-based public conversation app, built on Instagram's account graph and advertising business.
The bet
Riding anti-Musk sentiment, a text app built on Instagram's graph can claim the 'public conversations app with 1bn+ people' role.
How it started
Meta built Threads on Instagram's platform and launched it on July 5, 2023. Five days in, Zuckerberg claimed more than 100 million users - the fastest-growing consumer app ever, ahead of ChatGPT.
What happened
Mosseri said Meta released 'sooner rather than later' just to see if people were interested, so basics like hashtag search were missing. Similarweb found average daily time among US Android users fell from 21 minutes on July 7 to just over six on July 14, and Android DAU fell from 49 million to 23.6 million. Over a quarter of users were in India, 17.6% in the US. Twitter still held about 25 minutes and 107 million Android users.
What has to be true
Meta deliberately launched the app skeletal to test interest while Twitter stumbled, trading features for speed.
Missing basics like hashtag search gave users, in Similarweb's words, no compelling reason to switch from Twitter or build a new habit.
The audience was partly borrowed - over a quarter of users in India on day one - and borrowed attention washed out within a week.
Musk's moderation chaos gave Meta a once-off opening; the answer was to fill the space fast rather than finish the product.
What can be applied
Record signups are not product-market fit: shipping before the basics to catch a rival's crisis invites a retention cliff.
Aftermath
On July 18 Meta announced new features including an easier follower view and translation. Musk threatened to sue over poaching and trade secrets (Meta said no Threads engineer was a former Twitter employee) and challenged Zuckerberg to a cage fight. As of July 20, 2023, retention was the stated priority.
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