Author: Charles Goetz / Source: Adweek Online Alex Zhu is the founder and CEO of Musical.ly. Like many young entrepreneurs in the tech f
Like many young entrepreneurs in the tech field, Alex Zhu, the founder and CEO of Musical.ly, was looking for that one big idea that could change the world. He settled on an education app—it was a popular idea; he secured investors, built a team and launched a product.
And it was a total failure.
Turns out education, like healthcare, is very complicated, and in general people just don’t use their phones for educational purposes. Sure, there’s educational entertainment or apps that help you learn a new language, and we can Google anything and have an answer immediately. But those are all different than just opening an app simply to learn something.
So Zhu, who is about as thoughtful a leader as you are going to find in the tech world, went back to the drawing board. What do people mostly use their phones for? It’s communication and entertainment, and Musical.ly was born out of that realization, said Zhu during a packed South by Southwest panel on Wednesday. The app lets users create what are essentially short karaoke videos using 15 seconds of popular songs or quotes from movies, which are then shared with friends and the larger Musical.ly community.
It’s not a revolutionary idea and isn’t much different from what Dubsmash was already doing in that mobile space. So, how did Muscal.ly go from a good but not revolutionary idea to 55 million monthly active users and 15 million videos produced every day? Teens!
Teens have an entrepreneurial spirit that allows them to try new things and, most importantly, they cross-promote.
The early adopters you need
According to Zhu, if you want to start a social network from scratch, teens have to be early adopters. Teens have an entrepreneurial spirit that allows them to try new things and, most importantly, they cross-promote. Videos or content made on one platform end up getting reposted to all their other platforms. This lets creators maximize exposure while allowing content from a new platform to seep into the established networks.
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