Short pieces on why products win or lose, plus the occasional idea I picked up somewhere and could not leave alone.
product teardown
Snapchat invented the format; Instagram won it. It took all three of: making posting easier, a reason to check back every single day, and a huge audience Instagram already had to put Stories in front of. Remove any one and the product dies. A borrowed audience cannot save a product people would not return to on their own, and a new product has no borrowed audience to begin with.
product teardown
Instagram can afford features that merely keep people a little more engaged, because Instagram already supplies the crowd. A new product shipping the same feature on its own dies, because that one feature has to be the entire reason anyone shows up. Before copying a giant's feature, ask what is actually holding that feature up.
note
An AI agent could read every page of a big wiki and still could not find the right one. Not a search problem, it turns out. The idea came from a thread on X; the working through it is mine.