Threads Faces 7 Big Risks

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Anyway… you just might have heard that Meta launched Threads, their Twitter-clone, on Wednesday night. At press-time, I have a modest 386 followers (I’m @callmehouck) while the platform has over 70 million users.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about what Threads is and is not, but not a lot about the risks Meta is taking by launching it — even potentially impacting the future of Instagram.

I’ve helped build hyper-growth products at Uber and Airbnb, and multiple communities, so this week I’ve put together a deep dive of the 7 major risks facing Threads, and how likely each is to be a longterm issue 👇

The 7 Risks Facing Threads

Going Viral is Too Hard

“Building a new social platform is very similar to running a country or an economy.”

TikTok’s founder, Alex Zhu, said this onstage during a fantastic talk he gave in 2016. He went on to say that the only way to get people to migrate to a new country is to show them that anyone, including them, can rise to a higher social class in the new country faster than their old country.

TikTok executed this perfectly by building up new stars like Bella Poarch, Charlie D’Amelio and many others who had no audience before. This ability to potentially win the lottery is the primary thing that drives users to adopt a new platform.

Here’s the full clip (go to 10:19):

Anecdotally, I don’t see Threads doing this. Reach seem to be largely proportional to follower count.

This would mean that growing on Threads will be closer to the grind of growing on the now-mature Instagram and Twitter, instead of the early days of TikTok.

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