Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Launch of Threads Accidentally Reveal the Hardest Part of Entrepreneurship?
Watching Meta navigate the complex roll-out of its potential Twitter killer is offering entrepreneurs everywhere plenty of valuable insights.
You’ve surely seen the news that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg launched a Twitter competitor called Threads. Along with that, you’ve also surely seen reports that Threads amassed somewhere around 100-gagillion-trillion-billion new users in its first 83 minutes of existence (note: all numbers are approximations). The sudden launch and meteoric growth of Threads was certainly interesting to watch and discuss, but, from an entrepreneurial perspective, the most important data is coming a couple weeks after its launch.
According to industry sources, daily active users on Threads has dropped 70%. Meanwhile, average time on site is 4 minutes (versus 30 minutes for Twitter).
As someone who teaches entrepreneurship for a living, I want to discuss what’s happening and why it matters. But first, I’m going to borrow a reliable pedagogical tool from my trusty bag of professor tricks to test your knowledge of the situation. That’s right: It’s pop quiz time!
(Don’t worry… the quiz is multiple choice.)
The most appropriate way to respond to recent news reports about Threads’ atrocious decline in usage is to:
A) Make a casual shrugging gesture
B) Give a condescending smirk
C) Laugh hysterically as the schadenfreude overtakes you
D) All of the above
Honestly, any answer is fine so long as it identifies what’s happening with Threads as unsurprising. The “correct” answer depends more on how much you care about Mark Zuckerberg and the larger Meta entity. Most people are somewhere around an A. Elon Musk is closer to C. Regardless, no matter the answer, let’s just be clear that the precipitous decline in Threads usage is an inevitability.
The decline in usage for threads shouldn’t even be “news.” It was a foregone conclusion from the moment Threads launched because it follows a fundamental law of entrepreneurial innovation that goes something like this:
The hardest part of entrepreneurship is never building and launching products. The hardest part of entrepreneurship is permanently changing people’s behavior.
Changing people’s behavior was always the challenge Threads was facing. Honestly, I don’t know why everyone was getting so worked up over the number of signups. Heck, if I started with an active audience of 3 billion people and 85,000 employees to leverage, I feel like I could get 100 million people to do something in a week, too. If anything, 100 million might even be low. As a result, the question about a project like Threads was never: “Will people try it?” The question was always: “Will people adopt it?” And that’s because, for Threads to work, Zuckerberg has to overcome an enormous amount of inertia in the space. People are either already using Twitter, or they could be using Twitter and they’re choosing not to. In both cases, the status quo is firmly entrenched.
It’s this status quo, more than anything else, that’s causing the declining usage for Threads. And because declining usage is what we would have expected to happen, the interesting news in Meta’s initiative to create Threads isn’t that the platform is struggling to get active usage. The interesting news is that we’re seeing an absolute behemoth of a company with decades of experience building effective social media platforms get absolutely gobsmacked by the most immutable law of entrepreneurship.
How cool is that? Changing people’s behavior and habits is so freaking hard that even Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are struggling with it. By the way, that means you’d better prepare to struggle with it, too.
To be clear, I’m not arguing the challenge of user adoption is a reason not to launch your startup. I’m also not arguing Threads is going to fail. Instead, I’m using the struggle of Threads to remind entrepreneurs everywhere of what really matters when launching ventures.
Most entrepreneurs love thinking about building their products. They also love thinking about raising millions of dollars, and they love imagining having huge teams of people working for them. But none of those things are what you need to be thinking about.
When you launch your startup, you need to be 100% focused on how you’re going to change consumer behavior. After all, changing consumer behavior is the biggest challenge every new venture faces. That’s true whether the venture is being launched by two teenagers in a garage or one of the largest companies in the world.