Executive Briefing
The Noma experience
And a visit to Empirical Spirits.
By Dan Frommer on Wednesday, May 1, 2019 at 3:15 pm
While researching last week’s piece on direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands — and how few have been acquired for more than $1 billion or have gone public yet — I kept thinking about a similar situation in the mobile apps industry almost a decade ago.
After Instagram launched in late 2010 and was an instant hit, there was a boom of lookalike mobile photo-sharing apps: the Instagram for Android, the Instagram for food, the Instagram for video, the Instagram for whatever, all fueled by venture capital.
But after Facebook famously paid $1 billion for Instagram in 2012… that was basically it. Instagram become the Instagram for all of those purposes. Other than Tumblr, there weren’t billion-dollar deals for many other mobile-social apps. The ones that thrived did so with new mechanics (WhatsApp, Snapchat) or geographical focus (WeChat, Line). Most are gone.
Is that, I wondered, how it’s going to play out here, too?
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