Patrick McKendry

A true competitor to Twitter may finally be emerging. Launched in the middle of last week, Meta’s new text-based social app has rocketed its way to over 90 million users in a matter of days.¹ That number alone - fueled by an Instagram-integrated sign-up flow - is enough to make Threads feel like a legitimate contender, particularly when compared with Mastadon’s 13.3 million users.² Pacing to hit 100 million downloads within a week of launch, the pace of growth is notable for blasting through the blistering growth pace of ChatGPT’s 2-month timeline to hit that number of users.³ The volume is more important, however, for its potential value in creating legitimate network effects in the platform. Social media platforms only become useful when communities exist there. Thanks to its connection with Instagram, Threads should be able to meet that requirement in ways that existing Twitter alternatives have struggled to deliver. Investors are similarly optimistic, estimating potential revenue growth for Meta via Threads to the tune of $800 million in 2024.⁴

The story is not all sunshine and roses, however. Twitter has already threatened to sue Meta for misappropriation of trade secrets and intellectual property, a claim which Meta flatly disputes.⁵ The app is a definitive first-version, lacking common platform features like chronological and following feeds, direct messaging, effective search and hashtag functionality, and the ability to delete your account.² Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and overseer of Threads, has been masterfully addressing concerns and highlighting his focus on getting the user experience right first and advertising experience right later.^6,7 Mosseri’s concerns are warranted as Meta does not have a great track-record of new product launches - Facebook Dating, Portal, Facebook Neighborhoods, and Horizon Worlds were all flops.⁴

In any case, no matter how you look at Threads, it is derivative. Just like Facebook Stories was derivative to Snapchat Stories and halted Snap’s growth in its tracks.⁷ Just like Instagram Reels was derivative to TikTok and is growing in engagement on the platform as TikTok adoption starts to show signs of slowing.⁸ However, the question we need to ask is whether or not that is a bad thing. Obviously, IP theft and improper claiming of credit is wrong. However, when we think about maximizing the productivity of our work and our teams, learning from the success of our competition is highly effective. In many ways, it is really the default state of activity. To quote venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee, “Obviously, we'd rather be genius and invent first. But if you can't, then copy first and then iterate."⁷ Here, we will look at the deeply intertwined world of copying and invention, the importance of good timing, and tactics we can implement to use this approach successfully for our teams.

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Timing Isn’t Everything, But It’s a Lot of the Thing

Threads has garnered a lot of attention for its similarity to Twitter thanks to its quick adoption and Meta’s history for riffing off of its top competitors for product feature inspiration. However, Threads is far from being the only Twitter look-alike. BlueSky looks almost identical to Twitter and is one of a list of text-based microblogging sites that offer their own spin on how social media should be done.⁹ Yet, at only a few days old, Threads has become the clear heir apparent to an ever-more-troubled Twitter.

Part of that success is certainly a result of the app’s ability to draft off of the massive Instagram network to build up its user network. Interestingly, another large factor is that the Threads team did, arguably, the least of any competitor to differentiate itself from Twitter’s interface and functionality. We can argue whether that is a result of low inspiration, a better focus on actual user wants, or an impressive level of restraint to not try and change too much in the social media landscape all at once. Still, there is one other factor that I would argue has helped Threads spread like wildfire.

In 2001, the music industry was in a free fall as digital audio piracy and CD burning were cratering physical sales. As MP3 players started to arrive on the scene, record labels took a litigious approach to protecting their business, suing filesharing services and audio player companies alike in order to protect what revenue the labels could still maintain.¹⁰ From the chaos, the iPod emerged. Apple’s story of success in music is certainly one of great product design, but also a story of great timing. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, a few things had recently become true.

The Recording Industry Association of America had recently lost an injunction case trying to prevent the sale of a popular MP3 player. This loss left the RIAA in a position where it had no choice but to find ways to work with, rather than against, digital devices.
Toshiba had just developed a 5GB disc drive, which increased on-device storage capacity from roughly that of a CD to roughly 1,000 songs. Apple immediately inked a deal for exclusive rights to the technology.
Apple had recently launched its iTunes service for Mac, enabling song management without the content catalog limitations that each record label had. That service led to the iTunes Store that ultimately grabbed 70% of the legal music download business. That market position, paired with Apple’s stance that music should not be free or stolen, largely determined the labels' acceptance.

For his company, Jobs saw an opportunity with the perfection conditions aligning for a blockbuster product. There were numerous alternative products at the time, and each could have been a viable offering to move the industry into the digital environment. It was the iPod that eventually captured 74% of the portable player market.¹⁰ Apple’s products were undoubtedly good, but its timing in capturing that market was perfect.

The success of Threads also looks like it will be accelerated by perfect timing. Twitter has already been staving off competitors since Elon Musk took over the platform at the end of 2022. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, has put support behind BlueSky. Mastodon has gotten press as a viable alternative. Spill, Post.News, Substack Notes and Cohost have all thrown their hat in the ring as a landing spot for users looking to leave Twitter.⁹ None have really stuck.

Meanwhile, Meta had been developing its alternative fairly quietly. That all changed this month. Beginning Saturday, July 1, #TwitterDown and “Rate Limit Exceeded” became trending topics on Twitter with more than 7,400 reported app and site outages being reported.¹¹ Users shared screenshots of error messages they received noting that their feeds were not loading due to rate limits. Musk responded, sharing an internal policy update to restrict the number of viewable tweets in a day as a temporary measure to restrict data scraping by AI companies. This was in addition to recent policy preventing non-logged-in users from reading tweets. Some theories offered that the true underlying cause stemmed from issues over Twitter’s Google Cloud contract, which ended on June 30th.¹² Regardless of the cause, users pointed to the issues as another sure sign of Twitter’s demise as frustration with the platform appeared to be at an all-time high. Two days later, Threads appeared in pre-launch on the Apple App Store. On July 5th, it went live.¹³

Aristotle taught about 4 methods of persuasion. The 4th, kairos, translated from Greek as “opportune” or “right moment”, focused on the value of sharing your message in the right environment or at the right time.¹⁴ For our teams, it is an important reminder. Proposals that do not get traction are not necessarily bad, they may just be timed poorly. And it is not always the best ideas that win, but often those that meet a user’s problem statements at a time when those problems are causing significant pain. This guidance can influence how we work in many different scenarios.

First, when we think about presenting information, it is good to follow the standard advice of thinking about the presentation from the audience’s point-of-view. Kairos emphasizes the value of this by highlighting that the audiences’ reaction will be impacted by their current problems. It is not enough to think about what is generally an issue for our audience. Speaking to what potential future problems may be will also likely fall flat. Instead, we can maximize persuasion by focusing our solutions on the problems at hand.

Second, when collaborating across teams we are often looking to create win-win outcomes where both sides are able to make progress against their individual priorities. However, it is not quite that simple. Kairos helps explain why solutions that are timely are going to get better traction and move more quickly towards completion. As such, it is good practice to have a few different priorities that are top-of-mind for our teams, rather than just a single point of focus. With only a single focus, we need to wait for the timing to become right for us to reach priority alignment. However, with a selection of priorities, we are able to act against whichever priority matches the current top-of-mind problem. What we likely have to sacrifice on maximum potential impact, we can more than make up for in speed because we will have the tailwinds of cross-team support at our back.

Finally, we should remember to time our proposals and requests in order to maximize acceptance. In the simplest example, ask for help from others on Mondays - they are less likely to have already planned out their weekly priorities and be willing to add in your request. More broadly speaking, this means not seeing a rejected proposal as rejected but simply one to be revisited in the future. For example, when a business’s general manager may want to focus on maximizing margin, they are likely to reject marketing campaigns that drive revenue at break even margin. However, a future strategic shift to grab market share and go public would flip that decision almost immediately.

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Be a Copycat, But Do It Well

It probably goes without saying, but Elon Musk is not happy about Threads. Musk took to Twitter regarding the potential legal suit against Meta, stating “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”¹⁵ Twitter’s position is that Meta snapped up engineers that Musk laid off at the end of 2022 and has used their insider knowledge to largely recreate the Twitter platform. Meta has stated in response that no engineers from Twitter work on the Threads project.⁵ Stealing IP is cheating, but copying effective ideas from competitors is not. In a way, the feed-based social network around which Twitter was built has its roots in Facebook.

Copying winning business strategies goes back much further than this current dispute. We can find a nearly endless number of successful product copying across industries and years.

In 1920, General Motors implemented a tiered brand pricing strategy to mirror the success of Ford’s low-priced Model T. Ford, in turn, designed the Model A to mirror some of GM’s higher-valued models.^16,17
The first Kit-Kat was sold in Britain in 1935 with a look-alike product brought to market in 1937. To this day, Nestle and Cadbury frequently go back-and-forth in court on trademark protections regarding the shape of the bars and various brand colors.¹⁸
In 1990, Nintendo controlled 90% of the U.S. video game market. Sega copied the game style and mascot success of Super Mario to create Sonic the Hedgehog and watched sales soar, peaking at 55% market share.^{19, 20}

Sega represents an interesting outlier here because after achieving success through copying, their console business collapsed after roughly a decade and lost $200 million in their final year producing consoles.²⁰ Unlike the other copycats, Sega failed to operate their business successfully as it grew. Their collapse is an important reminder that copying winning strategies of a competitor does not come close to guaranteeing success. Their story sheds a new light on the thought that “ideas are cheap, and execution is everything”.

It remains to be seen how Mosseri, Zuckerberg, and their teams will execute against the potential of Threads as a legitimate alternative to Twitter. Meta’s deep pockets, the company’s history in social media, and Zuckerberg’s reported obsession with understanding and capturing his competitor’s value propositions certainly gives the team a chance. The stark contrast of Twitter’s infrastructure outages on July 1 with Threads smooth sailing through a truly never-before-seen ramp-up suggests that the contender has what it takes to succeed at scale.

An Obvious Caveat

All that being said, it is hopefully clear that if all everyone does is copy each other’s business models and ideas, then we run the risk of stalled innovation. This is both a fairly obvious caveat and also a largely unlikely outcome. Still, most companies show a strong preference for innovation over imitation. Many want to find growth through creating new ideas. The problem is that innovation as a growth lever is not such a simple one to pull.

A 2020 research study by Bloom et. al. looked at research productivity over decades and their findings are truly fascinating. The researchers broke down economic growth into this simple formula and dove into the measurement of each metric.²¹

For example, the researchers examined the well-known Moore’s Law, the descriptive view that computing power will continue to double every one to two years.²² To examine the principle, they looked at the semiconductor industry and found, in fact, that the trend held true. This was described as compounded economic growth of 35% annually.²¹ However, when digging further, the researchers found an alarming trend. In order the maintain the rate of growth associated with Moore’s, the number of researchers working in the industry has grown 18 times since 1970.²¹ The net effect is that research productivity has been dropping sharply at a fairly constant rate of 7% lower productivity each year.²¹ As Bloom and his team stated “Ideas are getting harder to find.”²¹

If relying solely on copycat strategies is a recipe for stalled innovation and if relying solely on innovation is destined to become prohibitively expensive and challenging to find growth, how can we move ourselves and our teams forward most effectively? Simply, we can blend elements of the two approaches together. There are a few tactics we can use.

First, it is important that we remember to take the time to do competitive research. Often, teams can get too focused in their daily operations that they miss out on the multitude of successful strategies happening all around them. I recommend doing a monthly landscape review where members of the team look outwards for inspiration. Answer questions like “Is there anything that everyone else is doing that we are not?” or “What makes the market leader different in their product or their operations?” Next, review these findings with the entire team and work together to find at least one thing that you can operate more effectively, that would create greater customer value, or that would improve user retention. Innovation that is iterative is simply easier.

Second, focus on asking better questions and deeper research rather than simply jumping to brainstorming ideas. There is a quip in literature that no new stories have been written since Shakespeare. The spirit of the saying suggests that most new ideas for stories already exist somewhere else and the differences are in the story details. Thanks to the internet, the world has never been broader and access to information has never been easier. It is probable that another company has already solved exactly the problem with which you are struggling. When we jump immediately into brainstorming we let our innovation bias lead us to a potential future of wasted effort and overinvestment of resources. Instead, look for chances to copy when you can.

Third, remember that you do not need to build everything yourself in order to innovate. In many industries, truly innovative technologies are discovered in academic settings or at research institutions. Often, it is entirely different businesses who pair those findings with problem statements to create business value. For example, Snowflake - the cloud computing company - is starting to offer a service for businesses to train their own AI models exclusively on the business’s own data in order to create more refined model outputs. This is a great innovation for customers. But, the chips and software running, training, and tuning the models are not built by Snowflake at all. They are provided by Nvidia.²³ Often with innovation, it can be tempting to think that we need to start building from the very foundation. That does not have to be the case. Often innovation can be found simply through a contextualized implementation of a capability into a new space.

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Conclusion

When we go to the grocery store, we don’t need 5 options of bran flakes cereal to choose from. When visiting car dealerships, it can feel unnecessary to choose one car from tens of different types of sedans. iPhone vs Android may spark a lot of debate but the differences in hardware and software capabilities diminish further each year. It only makes sense that we would have more than one alternative to Twitter. Threads are certainly copying some of the best features of Twitter. However, that does not mean that the new app will be operationally sound enough to unseat the current market leader. It also does not need to be a bad thing if it pulls off a successful copycat alternative - viable competition is, afterall, a key capitalistic pressure to advancing the capabilities of companies. Perhaps the competition will finally force a solution to effective and balanced content moderation that these platforms badly need. Or maybe the competition will lead to advertising tools that better meet both consumer and advertiser needs, finally making a text-based microblogging app consistently profitable. In any case, the competition should certainly provide reason to continue to invest as good ideas become harder and harder to find.

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References

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Threads vs Twitter - How & Why to be a Good Copycat