TL;DR

Something Never Seen Before

• There's rarely a top-down or bottom-up analysis that leads to an insight that creates an experience that captures something and leads to tremendous consumer growth.
• Better have a core insight into a small market. Have the ability to expand beyond that than to be going after a big market from the beginning.

Messenger = Context Network

• All dating apps are messaging apps: Tinder, Bumble, Hinge...the point is to get in the DMs. Snapchat is photo messaging. Zenly is conversation that starts on the map. Discord, FB messenger, YOLO, Houseparty, Squad, Bunch, Roadtrip, Yubo—these are all messaging apps.
• Some are photo-based, audio, or text. All have one purpose in mind: get people in dialogue.

Viral

A reproducible testing process is more valuable than any one idea. Innovate here first. Getting 7 adult friends to install an app on a reproducible basis is non-trivial. If you can figure out how to do that, that's a bigger idea than your original concept. (Having a reproducible user acq. process is the best way to reach PMF)

• Getting into the hands of users and turning them into your biggest fans and proponents of the idea
• Top social apps had viral moments enabled by their early user base.
• Core action completion is a proxy to assess how much value is truly being created for the end-user.（Viral factor)

Easy to make progress early, increasingly hard to push the ball in even small increments later.

• You need to know the core vectors. For TikTok, it was increasing user dynamics (stitch/use this sound) and video tooling (effects, sounds, workflows)