META Meta Platforms Inc

By Katherine Bindley 

While I was sitting with a group of ex-Instagram and Facebook employees at their new office in San Mateo, Calif., talking about their recently launched app, one of them, John Barnett, opened a handwritten note that had been on the coffee table. It contained well wishes from his former "fam" at Facebook. The card came with a box of pins resembling the digital stickers people add to their social-media posts: "Mood." "Squad." "Good vibes."

The good vibes are notable mostly because Mr. Barnett is now the competition.

A former product manager at Instagram, he helped develop its wildly popular stories tool, which had been pioneered by Snapchat. Stories allow users to string together pictures and videos, enhance them with text, stickers and visual effects and share them with friends, usually for just 24 hours. Later, he went to Instagram's big sibling, Facebook, and built a nearly identical stories tool for it. Now he and two other former employees run Chroma Stories, an app for -- you guessed it -- making stories. Users don't post to the Chroma app, but they don't necessarily post on Instagram or Facebook either.

"Right now we're focused on helping people create for whatever platform they're on, if it's Facebook, Instagram, Snap, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Twitter," says Mr. Barnett. "We just want to empower their storytelling and give them I think more flexibility than what the platforms give them."

One approach to trying to build the next big app for Gen Z is to not build a social-media app. Instead, you build a social media-adjacent one. It's too hard to pull them away from the ones they're already on, so you meet them there -- on Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat -- and you give them something that feels cool and somehow distinct.

The Chroma app has various fonts, filters, layouts and live-photo elements. There are over 150 different templates in the free version of the app, some created with feedback from -- and named after -- influencers with thousands or even millions of Instagram followers. Some templates are Polaroid-themed, a vintage look that's big among Gen Z right now. To make money, the company charges $5 a month (or $30 a year) for a version with more bells and whistles.

It's not the first app to try to catch the Instagram comet by the tail. It's not even the first story-creation app -- Unfold and others do the same -- it's just the latest. But it does have a trio of founders who know the inner workings of the behemoths they need to achieve success. They know as well as anyone the peril in relying on them: The biggest players are regularly spotted copying the most innovative features of upstarts, and occasionally even buying those upstarts outright, only to squash them.

A Chroma comparison that comes to mind is VSCO. The photo-editing app launched in 2012, designed as a tool for photographers and artists to enhance their photos. Users soon began sharing their work on Flickr, Tumblr and a newer app called Instagram. In time, the #vsco and #vscocam hashtags were all over. In 2013, the app's founders added a social feed and, later on, more social networking, like the ability to republish someone else's post and send direct messages. The app has no ads. There's a free version and a $20-a-year premium version.

Today, nearly 40 million people use VSCO monthly, with 75% of its user base under the age of 25. It's also -- possibly by coincidence -- the label of a viral lifestyle trend: VSCO girls are teens who've got a certain relaxed, not-trying-too-hard aesthetic going on -- scrunchies, Birkenstocks and a beachy look are all key components.

Vas Natarajan, a partner with Accel, a VSCO investor, says in the early days, the company leveraged Instagram. "A lot of why we got downloads was because people would see folks post photos to Instagram but it would be hashtag VSCO," he says.

The trick, he says, is figuring out a way to get users back into the product. In this case, it's VSCO's own smaller social feed. VSCO doesn't display any popularity metrics, such as like and follower counts, and calls itself a "safe space," free of the judgment and comparison endemic on the major platforms.

"If you're an app developer, it makes sense if you can figure out a way to make this work, to leverage the reach and the audience of Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok," says Mr. Natarajan.

At Chroma, Mr. Barnett and his co-founders don't explicitly say they aspire to do what VSCO has done -- they say they haven't paid much attention to the app -- but there's notable overlap in the language they use to talk about their own product.

"Our drive is not to, like, get people to share," Mr. Barnett says. "We're really happy if you create and are happy with what you created."

Nesrin Danan, 24, is a photographer who was already using multiple tools outside of Instagram to create stories for her 120,000 followers.

"Instagram story tools are very primitive," she says. "I'm pretty picky about how my stories look, so usually what I'll do is take a photo or video or Boomerang and put it through VSCO, adjust the lighting and the grain and all the filters and stuff."

Chroma flew her out to San Francisco, along with two other influencers, to give feedback on the app. Eventually, they landed on the idea of each having their own templates. She's been using Chroma to make stories -- but still edits the actual photos in VSCO.

Justine and Olivia Moore are 25-year-old identical twins and investors at the early-stage venture firm CRV. They have a group of 175 Gen Z "scouts" who keep them posted on what's catching on. The women say that if an app offers a tool that complements a behavior Gen Z has already adopted -- and it's a tool they can't get already -- it's got a good chance of going viral. It's an easier entry point into the social-media market than trying to build a new network from scratch.

"The incumbent platforms are so big and people already have, like, broad audiences on those platforms. That is a heavy lift," says Justine Moore. "You'd have to get very lucky and have a very unique product in some way to have a huge new social platform."

But the piggy-back approach still comes with plenty of risk: You could flame out quickly if your user experience gets boring and you don't keep updating your tools. ("Next week there's a new trend in video," says Olivia Moore.) You've also got to avoid over-dependence. Apps that require the social networks in order to function have found their operations dismantled overnight when the social networks cut off their access. Others have been copied or acquired into oblivion. Twitter Inc. bought Vine, Facebook bought TBH, and neither survived.

The ultimate example, of course, are those stories. Before they were on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, "stories" were a key feature of Snapchat.

As my colleagues revealed this past week, Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. kept a "Project Voldemort" dossier to track Facebook's aggressive tactics. "Businesses continually build and iterate on concepts and ideas in the marketplace -- making them better or taking them in different directions," a Facebook spokeswoman told the Journal. "This is good for consumers."

That was part of Mr. Barnett's old job. The Instagram team he was on would meet with creators to find out what features they were using and what kinds of tools they'd ideally want. But Chroma's founders say they aren't worried about Instagram copying them, though they acknowledge it's a possibility.

"We've talked to a number of smaller social companies who probably wouldn't want to be on the record about this who do feel like once they release a feature, as soon as it starts getting popular and they're like a tool of a platform, the platform can just easily integrate it themselves," says Justine Moore. "If you get big enough, they can just crush you."

"Keywords" columnist Christopher Mims is on book leave.

-- For more WSJ Technology analysis, reviews, advice and headlines, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 28, 2019 00:14 ET (04:14 GMT)

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024