MVP of the year: Threads
Meta, the company that invested $13.7 billion into the “metaverse” in 2022…
Meta, the company that barely maintains the monstrous codebase that is Facebook…
… launched the best example of an MVP that I’ve seen all year.
This is how you know you launched an MVP:
Let’s run through some features that are core to Twitter and see if Threads has them.
- Explore page? no.
- Lists? no.
- Trending? nah.
- Ads? not yet.
- Analytics? lol.
- Logo? You get squiggly line.
- Drafts?! no!
- Bookmarks? no.
- Polls? new phone who dis?
- Desktop web app? shut up boomer.
- Can I at least delete my Threads profile without also deleting Instagram profile? You can kick rocks.
The list goes on!
But the icing on the cake, the thing that is making all domain name hodlers blood boil, is that Threads doesn’t even own the .com domain! What is this a joke? I literally went to threads.com and stared at the screen for a minute trying to process what I was looking at.
For context, Meta paid $60 million for “Meta” naming rights.
Threads is the MVP of the year. It will be the example I use as I continue to convince product managers to reduce scope.
But I should mention the whole distribution thing. The reason there are over 80 million accounts on Threads right now is because they have the enormous distribution channel, Instagram.
Distribution > product. Just look at Microsoft teams vs Slack.
But also:
Understanding customer needs > Distribution.
You can copy features, but you’ll never know where the puck is going unless you listen to users.
So we’ll have to wait and see who understands their customer needs better, Meta or Twitter? Who is focused on the customer and who is focused on training for a literal cage fight with the competitor?
No one knows if Threads will be successful or not. Remember Clubhouse and Google+?
But don’t be the person rooting for their failure. As consumers, it’s a good thing to have choice.
Will I be using Threads? Well, I’m trying to cut back on my doom scrolling, so no.
