Guest Post
BeReal: The $600M Anti-Instagram
In an age where we practically live with our smartphones in our hands, constantly checking social media (mostly Instagram/Twitter, does anyone still use Facebook?), exposed to the “perfect” lives everyone else seems to be living, do we really need another social media app?
Yes, if we were to go by BeReal’s hockey-stick growth over the last few months.
Source: Sensor Tower
Alexis Barreyat, an ex-GoPro employee, started BeReal alongside Kevin Perreau in 2019, in France. Quite the non-Silicon Valley start.
The free photo-sharing app sends a daily notification to users encouraging them to share still photos captured within a two-minute time limit using a smartphone user’s front-and-rear-facing camera 📷 simultaneously.
The notification could come at any time, which is what makes the app unique. The 2-minute time limit leaves no room for filters or editing. You’re supposed to show off your true, authentic self, doing the boring and mundane tasks you regularly do 🙋♀️.
Each BeReal that a user posts is only shared with their friends on the regular feed. However, it is possible to publicly share a BeReal on the Discovery timeline, visible to everyone.
BeReal is aimed at Gen Z users who are fed up 😤 with the perfectionist, algorithm-driven feedback loops of competitors such as Instagram and TikTok. This set of users places value on authenticity, largely due to being oversaturated with content.
The app’s goal is not to amass thousands of followers or massive influence for its users. In fact, their description on the App Store warns potential users, “if you want to become an influencer, you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.”
While some people might be hesitant to share themselves sleep-deprived 🥱 with thousands of vague acquaintances on Instagram, it’s much easier to share with your closest friends on BeReal. While you can have over 1,000 followers on Instagram, you’d probably only have 20 friends on BeReal, and you’d be happy with that.
Starting the fire 🔥 in college campuses
It’s no coincidence that BeReal’s first user market is made up of college students. Facebook came out of Harvard. Snapchat came out of Stanford.
College campuses are breeding grounds for social media startups. College students are not only the perfect test-pilots, but they also make for great promoters 📣.
BeReal gained momentum among French university students in 2021. Then, the app started spreading to the US and one of its first real attempts was Harvard.
On a Friday in early February, BeReal sponsored a party at a popular burger joint, with admission free to attendees who downloaded the app and added five friends.
They’re now running an active campus ambassador program. College students get paid to help the app grow its “college presence” by hosting parties to encourage downloads and identifying campus events prime for BeReal’s involvement. These campus ambassador programs were paying students up to $30 per referral.
Setting the right onboarding experience
The average mobile app sees 77% of new users drop off after the first 3 days. Retention rates on most mobile apps are terrible.
Great onboarding aims to guide users to their “aha moments” where they experience value from your app. Users who successfully receive value in their first visit will likely pledge their loyalty by sticking around long term and are known as activated users.
BeReal makes their value proposition extremely clear to every new user with a simple carousel that explains and reminds users about their value proposition and what to expect once they start using the app.
This increases activation and retention rates, getting more users to stick around long-term. Here are some other examples of great mobile app onboarding flows.
Growing beyond college campuses into the $600M 💰 juggernaut it is today
The fastest-growing companies typically have growth loops unique to their product that compound over time.
For consumer companies, this loop typically tends to be either:
- User-generated 👩👩👦👦 content loops, or
- A viral 🔁 loop (incentivised or organic)
- A paid marketing loop (most successful for D2C companies)
A large part of BeReal’s growth has been organic, fueled by word-of-mouth and users inviting others onto the app. Viral loops work best when:
- Value proposition extends to a broad % of the user’s network
- Short-time-to-value once a new user joins the app
- Very low monetization friction (free or low ticket sizes)
Like most social media apps, BeReal is free to use and can be shared by a user with all their friends. A new user would have to wait at the max 1 day to get a notification to post something “real”. This is why BeReal (and really most social media apps) grow virally.
Monetization strategy 🤑
It’s all fun and games in the consumer startup world till somebody brings up monetization.
BeReal is currently not making any money, completely funded by external investors.
But for any social media platform, monetizing users is directly correlated to engagement 🔁 on the app. Given BeReal’s 2-minute window to upload a post and then view your friends’ posts, there is just not enough engagement at this time.
The platform would need to find ways to increase engagement and time spent 🕙 on the app to effectively monetize its estimated 15 million daily active users.
Here are a couple of ways BeReal could monetize its user base:
- Image- or video-based advertising 📺: Risks ruining the user experience by injecting too much sponsored content when a user just wants to see what his friends are up to. Perhaps restricting this only to the Discover feed would be viable.
- Paid features and subscriptions 🗞: Similar to how Telegram monetized its audience. Animated profile pictures, unique stickers and reactions, verification badges in chats, etc. This seems to be the most likely way for BeReal to monetize.
- Sponsored challenges 👩👩👦👦: Brands would have the chance to promote challenges that are akin to their products and services. Those brands would then pay BeReal a fee in exchange for the platform running that challenge. Again, the platform needs to be aware of ‘friend’ page disruptions.
You know you’ve made it if Instagram and TikTok copy you
Does BeReal need to worry about Instagram and Tiktok duplicating its features? Well, not anymore, since these platforms have already gone ahead and copied the rising star 😅.
Earlier this month, TikTok unveiled TikTok Now, a new feature that sends users a daily prompt to capture a 10-second video or a photo using both the front and back camera.
Instagram is also rumored to be working on a BeReal-like feature.
We’ve seen this happen before ➡️. Snapchat used to be the hot new kid on the block, and Meta went ahead and copy-pasted its unique “stories” across Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.
In that sense, social media apps today quickly reach feature parity with each other.
Will that lead to users abandoning BeReal? I doubt it because at its core BeReal promises to be authentic, to your friends 🙌. These traits are very different from Instagram, where you’re forced to display nothing but your 110%. TikTok on the other hand is largely seen as an entertainment platform.
So users should continue to use BeReal to scratch their intimate-social-connection itch while leaving TikTok to satisfy their desire for online entertainment and community.
A few other threats that the rising social media app should watch out for:
- People get bored 🥱: BeReal turns out to be a passing fad, just another Clubhouse. Why did Clubhouse fall off? Probably a story for another time…
- Loses what makes it special 📉: A wise man once said: With great venture capital funding, comes great responsibility to show continued growth. Growth by adding new features, appeasing too many audiences, and in the process losing sight of what makes it special.
What’s next for BeReal ➡️
In the spring of 2022, BeReal was valued at $600 million 🙌 via their $60M series B.
Figuring out monetization is high on the leadership team’s list. They’re leaning highly toward adding paid features and subscriptions.
Today, where 100s of companies are interested in following the internet footprints of young people; uncurated, close-friends-only social media has obvious appeal. It only gives you 2 minutes to share, but BeReal might just outlive its 15 minutes of fame.
Of course, to give voice 📣 to the other side of the argument, the best and only way to truly ‘be real’ is to stay off social media and put the phone down.