Threads was off to an absolutely stupendous start with record-breaking number of users joining in the first week. During Meta’s earnings call with investors, Zuckerberg spoke about how Threads blew up. “Threads has been dramatically more than we expected in terms of the adoption and the rate of that. We thought this was going to be kind of a project that…we had a small team working on for a while, but it really kind of blew up and created a big opportunity immediately.”
The Meta CEO also admitted that the company really didn’t have too much success with standalone apps. The biggest exception to that, of course, is Messenger, but that started off as functionality inside Facebook and was spun out,” he told investors.
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He didn’t shy away from admitting that the early rush for Threads could be down to the chaos happening at Twitter. It could just be that this is such an idiosyncratic case because of all of the factors that are happening around Twitter or X, I guess, it’s called now,” he added.
Zuckerberg also compared the early impressive numbers of Threads to what a venture capital portfolio looks like. “A part of me wonders if this is just a kind of classic venture capital portfolio question, where you try a bunch of things and a bunch of them don’t work. And then every once in a while, one hits and is a much bigger success. It could be that.” Perhaps Zuckerberg is right on this front.
While early numbers have been impressive — that happens with a few startups as well — but the real challenge will be to retain the audience and keep the engagement numbers really high. It is something Zuckerberg is firmly aware of. “I’d say we have a lot of work to do to really make Threads reach its full potential. That’s not a foregone conclusion yet even though I think we’re off to a great start, and I’m optimistic that over time, this could be a fifth great app in the Family of Apps. But we have a lot of basic work to do.”
He said that Threads needs to build an experience. “It’s got to be something that people like so it has to have product market fit. Once you get that, it’s not always retentive. So a lot of people might like an experience but you need to kind of tune it so that way the numbers work so that people who use it are continuing. We feel like we’re getting to a good place on that with Threads. There’s still a lot of basic functionality to build,” he said during the call.