BeReal's journey to become the GenZ most wanted app 📲- Modern parenting: Are you a good parent? 🍼- Life changing questions that are more important than answers 🙇
What is it that you can think of, read, watch, listen and talk about for hours on end without tiring of it?
Episode #85. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼
This Sunday, The Timestamp is here again for you! Get your weekly dose of summaries from the articles, books, or podcasts you may have missed in tech & culture. This week’s episode is focusing on 2 topics that are completely disconnected: Parenting x BeReal.
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#1. BeReal phenomenon explained 📲
Ali Abouelatta and his newsletter First1000 (How founders got their first 1000 customers) goes through the journey of BeReal, the French app that is rocking the consumer app planet for GenZ. Here are my takeaways:
The antisocial GenZ app is rocking the world and it is French🇫🇷. This article takes you the full journey of growing a consumer social app from zero to.... 30m downloads in Sept22. How did they do it?
In short, starting in Jan20, it took 18 months to get to their $30m series A round with A16z (Andreessen Horowitz).
Andrew Chen the famous consumer app expert from a16z sees that BeReal has created a mechanism that boosts app user participation rates to the roof "BeReal requires users to post a picture in order to see what their friends have posted."
Then came the moment when the scalable engine for growth was built relying on 2 hacks that are very well known by consumer app specialists: 1. Building a university ambassador program and 2. Building momentum on Tiktok.
I would summarize things this ways. Zero to 1 >> Mastering a combination of high standard app design, relentless iteration until you get a consistent usage pattern witnessing 40% DAU returning to your app for >100 consecutive days and more.
Product Market Fit (PMF) to scale >> Scaling awareness using offline and online tactics can get you to the Pantheon of consumer apps.
Bravo BeReal!
Here is another interesting article dating from June 21 in case you want to know more about BeReal 👇
#2. Modern parenting 🍼
Patrick Kervern shares takeaways from an interview with Andrew Bomback; author of a book titled “Long days, short years. A cultural history of modern parenting”. Original resource in The Next Big Idea.
“The days are long but the years are short” sums up so much of the anxious energy around parenting today.
1. Parents are spending an increasing amount of time and energy on their children.
Today, a mother who works outside of the home spends essentially the same amount of time (and a lot more money) attending to her children as a stay-at-home mom did in the 1970s.
“The elusive, likely impossible, pursuit of mastery is the essential struggle of modern parenting.”
2. We use parent more as a verb than a noun.
The verb form of parent, and hence the concept of parenting, as something to do, rather than someone to be, technically arose in the late 1950s. But the use of the verb form exploded in the last three decades of the 20th century. As a cultural touchpoint, though, the verb form of parent feels like a distinctly 21st century word.[...] The verb form of “parent” suggests that raising children is a skill or science that can be learned, practiced, and mastered.
3. The parenting advice industry hasn’t necessarily made raising children easier.
[...] The how-to guides that are the lifeblood of parenting advice often feel like a set of instructions for a completely different product than what most parents have in their own homes. Parents can feel disappointed rather than encouraged because the scenarios depicted seem so different—and easier—than what’s happening in their families.
4. The big change is how mothers are presented in pop culture. There are still some too-good-to-be-true, how-does-she-do-it moms, but parenting content that is aimed toward mature audiences (provided that the content is created by women and driven by a desire for authenticity) is focused on exploring the mixed bag nature of motherhood. Recent examples include the bestselling novels The Need, The Upstairs House, Nightbitch, and The School for Good Mothers. I don’t think motherhood was easy 50 years ago and suddenly became hard. The evolution is the honesty that is now being employed in discussing motherhood.
5- Parents trying in vain to be perfect for their kids has consequences.
#3. Life changing questions 🙇
Life is simple … if you take the time to ask yourself some simple questions. Greg Isenberg’s thread on Twitter is trying to guide you through 16 questions that really matter in life.
Here are my top5, and I will leave you think about those questions for the rest of your Sunday ;)
If you had $50m in your bank account, how would your day to day change?
Do you really have to answer this message or email you received just now?
What is it that you can think of, read, watch, listen and talk about for hours on end without tiring of it?
Are you really trying your best or are you telling yourself you are?
Is this project making you a better person?
I will let you discover the other questions clicking on the Twitter post above 👆.
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See you next Sunday!