How the hell you monetize it to turn $8.6m in to an even bigger pile of cash is beyond me though.
I guess that's why i'm not an entrepreneur.
What this shows is that investors now want to be a part of the next Instagram or WhatsApp. They are literally throwing away the notion of profitability or monetization. Now the model is to get as popular as possible as quickly as possible. If you win that lottery Facebook or Google will sink BILLIONS of dollars into you.
My bet is these investors are looking at an app that has existed for less than two months and think they are getting in early on the next one of those. I'd love to know what the valuation was (north of $17M at least).
To be fair Google had no idea how they were going to monetize search for a significant amount of time.
I'd say the pivot is from usefulness / utility to entertainment / novelty.
Yep. Attention is the most valuable commodity these days and Secret has certainly managed to obtain it. Ad-based monetization would be pretty easy...if they even want to try monetizing before getting much bigger.
I'm a fan of secret, but where is it going? What is the bigger play? Surely there must be one for > $8 million.
1. Create a new app that's a slight variation of something popular that already exists.
2. Hype it like crazy.
3. Find someone clueless to buy, either a large corporation or have an IPO.
4. Repeat with the next idea.
It's basically the same model for hyping celebrities. Is Lady Gaga popular because she's a great singer, or because the media hypes her all the time? Similarly, is Secret popular because it's good, or because it's being promoted all the time?
It's an ignorant jab to discredit anything popular as being without merit. Loads of people said Facebook was a just silly toy for college kids.
I'm judging Lady Gaga based on brief fragments of recent songs I heard. Of course she may be pulling a "Jay Leno", using talent to produce the mediocre garbage that the mainstream media likes to promote.
Also, I DON'T use Facebook and Twitter. I never saw the point. Also, you're an IDIOT to build a web presence on Facebook, because then Facebook controls your ability to interact with your audience. Better to have your own site where your audience follows you directly and you control it 100%.
Thanks
It is one of the most beautifully designed apps I've ever seen. Every interaction adds to the functionality. The balance of beautiful and functional is amazing. Sure, many of the interactions may have been done before in other apps, but it's the whole package that blows me away.
The whole "LOL THEY AINT GON MAKE THE $$$$" is a tired argument. The more interesting conversation to be had centers around the design.
Unfortunately when you take money from someone else, the conversation changes to how much money you're going to make from that initial money.
I kid, I kid, but oh the things they could do lol
I agree that hype is a large part of this investment. But remember that hype is about 1000x as difficult to create than a product.
Still, as for today, I wonder how we'll know when we've jumped the shark?
But damn, that stylish hipster UI and all these cool Silicon Valley cats talking about how they hate Dave Morin....who doesn't want to ride that gravy train?
