It seems all the rage to write thought pieces on Twitter’s product problems. Hardcore users think they know the perfect ways to make it finally work. The point they miss is that there is no way to make Twitter (the product) a public market success. Twitter (the company) likely knows this, and is presumably working on a much more intelligent strategy.
Let’s review Twitter facts and core problems. Twitter had approximately 300M users, though as some have suggested that number is likely fairly inflated by bots/automatic integration, non-human account, etc. I would presume the real number of engaged humans is 150-200M (pulled out of ass). This is not a large enough social network for advertisers. They need more aggregate eyeballs.
Problem two, over 1B people have tried Twitter, formed an opinion, and left. The suggestion that increasing the amount of text you can plug in, or “open” is going to get these users to un-form their opinions is magical thinking. A strategy of re-activation has been tried (if you have an inactive account, you’ve seen the emails) and has not worked. Twitter’s brand is something very different to your cousin who set up an account in 2012 for a shot at free concert tickets than it is to power users. These users are never coming back to (product) Twitter.
Problem three, Twitter is worth too much damn money. It’s valued at $20B on ~$2B in revenue. An acquisition would likely need to be at $25-30B. Or, the stock price would have to drop to a point where it became rational to buy the thing as-is. People suggest Google and/or Facebook as buyers. While either could monetize Twitter better than Twitter, neither needs it strategically, and they likely couldn’t monetize it well enough to justify a purchase near this price.
The scenario in which Twitter becomes cheap enough to be bought given it’s current team/product is a scenario that plays out over too long a period to retain talent, in which case it arguably stays undesirable even at a lower price. Translation: Yahoo! buys them. Twitter needs to fix itself, in public. And they need to do it on vesting schedules while managing internal morale and improving external perception.
I’m pretty sure Twitter knows all this. My observation is that they are focused on improving engagement in Core Twitter (still important), while building/acquiring a suite of next-gen social products (Vine, Periscope, etc) that can be bootstrapped with Core Twitter. Don’t be surprised if you see some of the better Saccagestions spun out into standalone apps. Twitter’s core user base and existing content are sufficient to bootstrap more or less any kind of social product, and they have proprietary access to this asset. If I were them, I’d build, buy, and potentially invest in promising companies that could benefit from proprietary access to the graph/content.
You can’t go back in time and capture those 700M users who think Core Twitter is not for them, but many may give Sporter a shot, or TVitter. Again though, Twitter isn’t stupid, they get this. No doubt they’re working on finding the right focus internally and we’ll see new apps over the next year. The but is that most social apps fail (RIP Twitter Music) regardless of talent, and building them in public is a curse. And the ones that win, win slowly. Forced hypergrowth is a cancer that kills social products (RIP Google Plus).
So, as much as you’ve thought about Twitter’s product problems, Twitter employees have thought much more about them. And given the current state of the company, the core question we should be asking ourselves isn’t who the right CEO is to fix the product. The core question should be, who is the right CEO to buy the team enough time to get the strategy working and demonstrate to Wall St that Twitter the company is bigger than Twitter the product.
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