Why BeReal failed - thoughts from an indie developer.

Feels like we’ve all seen this movie (or perhaps App) before. The story usually goes something like this:

The idea: "Something with authenticity, you know, be yourself but not really yourself… or something like that….the kids are gonna looooove it".

The business plan: "Who cares! To the mooooooon baby".

The employees: "…Oh, we’re pivoting again…ok, are we still doing the authenticity thingy???".

I know the headline says “acquired for €500 Million,” but we all know what that means: the investors get some of their money back. The founders probably walk away with far less, if anything at all (depending on how much equity they gave up to get that sweet, sweet VC money to begin with.)

Most importantly, it means that all your photos are now being repackaged and sold to data brokers to train AI models. (Thank you!!)

At some point, BeReal and its investors decided that the way to turn authenticity into profitability was to monetize their users’ attention, which is exactly the same ol’ playbook used by all the big platforms. Ultimately this turned BeReal into just another social media app but with fewer users and much less money.

As an app developer, it’s all too tempting to chase vanity metrics, as they’re the yardstick by which others measure your success. Let’s BeReal (no pun intended); no one is going to be impressed when you tell them that your app makes people appreciate the small moments of life more (Boooooooring). The app industry is a game of metrics, where every single tap can be measured, optimized, and ultimately monetized.

I don’t know the BeReal founders personally, but it seems like they ran out of ideas at the height of the hockey stick. My guess is that they caught lightning in a bottle and couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Instead, they rolled out buggy features one after the other, leaving their users confused about what the app was really about…. Wasn’t it authenticity or something like that…

Believe it or not, there is another way to create and build a sustainable business around apps, but it will most likely never get you to the number one spot in the App Store, raise a gazillion dollars, and have everyone talking about it. Instead, it’s slow and tedious work where users (or, to use a slightly less drug-associated word, participants) feel like they’re participating in something bigger.

It turns out that when you create something that people value, they’re actually willing to pay for it. You won’t be able to have a fancy office, crazy kick-off parties, or a massive engineering department, but instead, you can build an app project for the long term that will hopefully stand the test of time or, at least until the next hot app with questionable privacy terms is about to take off.

Thanks for reading