Taptalk, slingshot Why new chat apps are getting worse

Yo. is a mobile chat application, known as "No typing can communicate," by adding the other account, or after importing contacts, the buddy list will be rough in the big characters on your first screen, click the contact, the other side will receive a "yo! "Push message, if open sound, still can hear a low male voice" yo! ".

Text, pictures, short videos, stickers are not supported. All you can do is click on the contact account number and send a "yo! "Quick dot two, send a" yo ".

If you are serious about analyzing yo! Why does the product fire up and make a fuss? But, combined with the recent new Taptalk, Slingshot and so on, you can talk about why the chat application is more and more exotic.

Why the sudden fire?

Yo. Online on April Fool's Day on April 1, the development took only 8 hours. After a period of silence, was shared to Producthunt, attracted a lot of investors look at the same time, about Yo. Discussions also spread on Twitter.

Producthunt you can interpret it as a product version of Hackernews. The audited members can post their own discoveries or develop new products on the website, and other members can point praise or comment to a single pinned per day. At present, Producthunt has become one of the most important channels for Silicon Valley to discover early projects.

Single "Application" products, Producthunt very good solution to a problem: You can find new, cool, fun applications here.

Apple's list is too popular, and it's hard to find some interesting, but slightly niche, products that Chris Dixon previously wrote that relying on a company's list would easily stifle innovation because of popular tastes and the preferences of the platform itself. Apple itself is aware of the problem and has launched a "classified browsing" to try to solve the problem.

Judging from the figures published by Producthunt (pictured below), it has become a new product discovery for Silicon Valley VC.

After being discovered, yo! The main reason this product will get 1.2 million of dollars in funding is that investors don't want to miss out on any chance of investing in the next category of Snapchat-class products.

Because of the "Kryptonian application" (Micro-signal: Krapps) Relationship, recently found many in the function and play, the repeated surprise chat products, such as: Taptalk, Slingshot, yo!

These products, together with the previous Snapchat, are singularly victorious. In my opinion, this kind of product, also all go "through new play, attract young user group, enlarge user base, transform become IM class product" path.

The first thing to do is to sort out the concept that social products and IM products overlap (such as micro-letters with friends), but are inherently different.

Social products such as mobile-end Facebook, Instagram, MO, Taptalk, Slingshot, Yo, Snapchat, IM products such as micro-mail, line, Facebook Messenger, WHATSAPP, IMessage.

The two is a very big difference is that IM products to contact acquaintances, the value of the information is real-time, safe, stable transmission, and social products, is mainly fun, fun, in addition to acquaintances, can also play with strangers.

In other words, if you want to communicate efficiently, you will choose the IM product, and if you want to have some fun, you will choose social products.

IM developing to the present, the homogeneity of the function is already too serious (even in the profit pattern is also so), also because of basic text, voice, pictures, short video and other basic functions of the same, decided that users choose to use that product is their friends are using which product, so the region is particularly strong. found that the market has been basically saturated.

There is still a lot of play in the social product of socializing with acquaintances, or with strangers. For example, MO, Taptalk, Slingshot, Yo, Snapchat and so on. The imagination of such products is that you do not know what young people like, so you can use the new game to attract them, when your user base is large enough, you can go to the IM product transformation.

The best example of this is Snapchat. It was originally "burned after reading" The concept of the birth, and then launched the "another", "Online text messaging, video chat functions, and then to the recent" Our Story ", step-by-step, has begun from a happy product to be able to completely use it to replace the transformation of other products, and this, in my opinion, It is also so overvalued that it has caused the Facebook takeover to be a rush to Copy.

Similarly, Taptalk, Slingshot, Yo. are also in the walk Snapchat verified road, not they want novelty, but in IM already very mature situation, have to novelty win, a beat eyeball and user, I guess similar application in the future should have a lot. And as investors, naturally do not want to miss any one may become the next Snapchat products.