Threads, the Meta-developed Twitter competitor, arrived with much fanfare. Being an old-school Twitter skeptic from the years before Elon, I jumped into Threads to see if I’d find something other than a river of content worth avoiding. Because of my skepticism I waited a few weeks to form an opinion. Though I did engage in one more Thread than I ever had on Twitter, which was one Jonathan Maze Thread about old brands. My first and current impression of Twitter was not good. But for Threads, for a glorious few minutes anyway, I was able to see content from people I had signed up to see, willfully followed and cared reading about. There was no spam, ads or bots telling me who I should be angry at and who the flavor of distrust was that day.
When the avalanche of clunky algorithmically driven content started to hit my feed as the world of influencers and advertisers flocked to the site, I found myself tuning out without consciously attempting to do so. I really had to go digging for what I came to see. I eventually just stopped digging. Instead of what I wanted to find when I first signed up, I now found a giant Thread woven together without regard for my feeble attempts to stitch together a community that made sense for me. On day three, it took me several minutes to scroll through and find a post from someone I cared to see content from. It was like the first 10 years of Facebook and Twitter happened within a span of three days. It went from “Hey there are my old friends” to “whoa, I didn’t ask you that” very fast. The search function helped me find a bunch of Influencer accounts but was and is no help in finding meaningful content. My Instagram friends were all neatly recommended to me in a row, which was nice to see and made not having to play the game “bot or not” that made Twitter such an awful platform a big competitive advantage. On the surface, the ability to create a network quickly was attractive. Yet, it is no wonder the user base has flatlined; reportedly by 82%. Threads was clearly not ready to facilitate what its users were wanting, which was an alternative to Twitter. Not a new Twitter, but something better.
The quick adoption of so many potential users was a sign that demand for a Twitter alternative is far beyond what Twitter will be able to handle when that viable alternative finally arrives. But, with all its faults, whatever you use it for, Twitter is just good enough to keep us hooked. Myself? I use it to check on the nation’s id, as well as the egos that show up as “trending”. Other people are trying to market, but mostly it appears to other marketers. Some try to influence, but mostly to other influencers. The rest of us either watch the steady content stream in horrified fascination or engage with it half-heartedly through a series of memes, jokes, gifs, etc.
The lesson here is that when clear demand exists for something different and that demand was obviously overwhelming, getting it wrong is potentially costly. For restaurants, this whole episode has obvious implications for marketing strategy and where to put your dollars. But under the surface it also implies a potential rethink to how we are developing technologies to meet the demands of the more digitally driven restaurant market.
In the technology world, it is very common to roll out an “MVP”, which if you haven’t heard that phrase outside of sports is actually somewhat of an oxymoronic acronym standing for Minimally Viable Product. Threads truly was the real MVP in this story and that’s its problem. Unless that is, the entire investment driving Threads development was truly just a sparring match between two billionaires and if you believe the internet, apparently the Blue Bomber has been building an Octagon in his backyard to prep for battle with the Red Rocker, Elon himself.That can’t be real right? Well, the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot references are real. I assure you of that.
Like a lot of things these days, I’m choosing to suspend my disbelief and trust that there were sound business reasons for building this Threads thing. When I do that, I start to suspect the mentality of rolling out an “MVP” was the plan all along.
It is tempting and quite common to roll out MVPs and there are very good circumstances in which it makes sense to do so. Investment resources are finite and your time horizon to turn on revenue is often short. Perhaps you have Alpha or Beta testers or customers willing to be those testers. Or your business is locked behind a paywall of clients who trust your process an will help you “get there”. All are fine and good circumstances. However, one must be very clear-eyed about what an MVP actually is when you are developing a challenger product in a densely competitive market. Its first live iteration will need to knock customer use cases out of the park to gain traction. It may be tempting to launch the MVP before its ready for fear of not being first to market. But the risk of losing early adopters for a very long time and quite possibly forever is huge. You will have to double down your investment and marketing dollars in order to win them back.
For restaurants, this is the context of technology investment. Take for example, the competitively dense digital loyalty market. The major challenge is not necessarily getting downloads from customers, it is ensuring that the app sticks with the customer. To stick, it must be useful in ways that are not always apparent or obvious. You might think “well at least our customers can redeem a reward and order on the app”. That’s great. But that is not enough to be minimally viable in this context. Domino’s beat you to it. McDonald’s has caught up and the 3rd party order aggregators are catching on. To be competitive it also has to be minimally viable from a competitive features standpoint.
That second aspect of viability is sometimes the hardest to define. You will have to have a full picture of the use cases required by your customers, including how those use cases come to life on your competitors’ platforms. You must test and learn what incentives will hold your customers’ attention; what features will “wow” them in ways they could not articulate themselves until after they used them. In short, be clear-eyed about your audience's needs across the entire customer journey. Once you have mapped out the use cases that will make the product not just functionally viable but also competitively viable, then build a roadmap where the product launch only happens when the features that meet both those criteria are developed. That is your MVP. It should function well and compete even better. This was the problem with Threads. It functions well enough at sign-up but does not have the content control features to facilitate sticky engagement. Those features are likely under development or on the way. But the risk of launching without them or too early means, Threads lost some of us forever and the rest will be expensive to win back. That same level of enthusiasm may not be there the second time.
Let Threads be a cautionary tale. Yes, the verdict is still not fully out on Threads. But many of our businesses do not have Meta’s resources to reinvest in lost customer acquisition due to a failed technology launch. If you do, then perhaps you also have the free time and money to build that backyard Mixed-Martial Arts Octagon that your Twitter handle has always wanted for itself. Wouldn’t it be better to instead devote that capital to a couple of extra development cycles? I’m sure your neighbors will love your backyard boxing sessions, but your customers will love you even more if you make them a compelling offer that is easy to find and rewards their loyalty.
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