While hunting for internships in Beijing / China, I got to know really a lot of cool people. I was a foreigner, not experienced, no Chinese language skills, … hence I got rejected a lot for good reasons and hence the pool of people I interacted with was really large.

One such interaction was with one of the founders of Zenga. A really smart person, with a good vision and plently of money to experiment with. At the time he created a social network that was really impressive. I got to know and fall in love with Elixir since then. Now, this person and his team were really bright people, did everything right and yes, you guessed it, the experiment failed. I had a 3 hours conversation with him, it was obvious that I am not getting my internship 😄 but one of the questions was what do you think can make a social network succeed. Well, after more than 5 years, here’s my take.

The obvious part

Yes, your social network should look familiar, yet with better functionality.

The network effect (second obvious part)

Unsuprisingly, why do you think I have a fakebook messnger app and account? why do I have a Telegram account? why am I not using Briar & Tox for everything already? well, I am forced to by the network, very few people around me will agree to use this. People value convience more than anything else after all.

This is all known. So let’s extract a recommendation from here. Create the network, talk to universities, institutions, … show them what you got and have them force your solution on the people they have authority over. It sounds extreme, yes, but it worked with WeChat, it’s working with substack, … What else can be done?

Find a group of people without a home and create a home for them

Discord started as the IM for gamers (I still refuse to use that shit). Here’s an idea, I heard a recruiter wishing there would be a social netwrok for recruiters only. Do it for doctors, researchers, …

It must be familiar

Normies aren’t going to go through Briar or Tox, start using them and appreciate all that. They would rather use a shitty fakebook messenger clone.