⚠️ Time to BeWorried ⚠️

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If you see a social app that’s growing quickly, there is only one question that matters: “Can Meta copy this?”

In the old days they could at least acquire you, so you’d get something out of the deal. But times have changed. Lately the FTC has been guarding Meta more aggressively than Dennis Rodman guarded Karl Malone in the late 1990s! Nobody is getting acquired anytime soon, it seems.

So all that’s left to do is A) ignore, or B) copy. And there are very few companies that are less interested in ignoring emerging competitors than Meta.

Snapchat and TikTok both have faced this challenge, and sustained varying degrees of damage. But these battles are actively playing out, and, especially in TikTok’s case, the future is still up for grabs.

Meanwhile, a new contender has emerged from the unlikeliest of places (France). BeReal was founded in 2020 by a former GoPro engineer, and the app slowly and steadily marinated until breaking out in summer 2021, vaulting from negligible DAU to 300k+ DAU, and raising $30m from Andrew Chen at Andreessen Horowitz—the same guy who led the big Clubhouse and Substack rounds.