#2 Zibo Gao - consumer social podcast
Founder of Sincerely, among other things
The following is a Q&A extracted from my talk with Zibo Gao.
You can watch and listen to the full interview on youtube:
Who is Zibo Gao and what is he up to?
I am Zibo, I grew up in China, came to the US for high school stayed ever since. I was an investor before with a micro pre-seed consumer fund and looked at all the verticals within consumer and then in 2021 jumped out and started building in consumer. I built a couple of music apps, which turned out to be a terrible space to build in and now I'm building Sincerely since last October. It's going really well, I’m enjoying the process with still a lot to figure out since we are pre-product-market-fit and experimenting a lot.
What does consumer social mean to you?
This is a great question and then another question is what is success for Consumer Social. Those are all really really interesting topics.
I think within Consumer Social, there is:
Core Consumer Social are products that derive the most utility out of having your IRL friends on the app and absolutely require syncing contact books and inviting friends and doing all of that. It doesn't matter if the app’s content is messaging or any other medium. If it requires your actual friends, that's core Consumer Social.
Weak Consumer Social is interacting with strangers, no matter if they are real, anonymous, or pseudonymous through text or any other form of content produced.
Broadly speaking, anything other than that I think you can you can bucket them into utility or just mess around projects and the marketplaces. The community also counts, but that's a totally separate topic.
What brought you to the consumer social space and why did you make the jump from investor to founder?
There are 3 reasons why I want to be in consumer and then more specifically consumer social.
The first one is that I've always wanted to be a musician. That's why I started in music. I’ve been playing music my whole life and I actually wanted to go to The Juilliard School but didn't get through the final round, so that's why I'm not a musician. Then in college, I had a band I actually toured in New York.
Really all I want to do in life is be a rock star, but I'm not talented enough and that dream is probably never gonna get there. Unless one day I become a billionaire and own a music festival, at which point I can be on stage with whoever I want. I've tried plenty, which is another reason why I'm doing Sincerely.
Interacting with people, and seeing how music resonates and how it spreads overnight has always fascinated me. If you look at the way music spreads overnight it is very similar to the way digital products do. So I've always been interested in the cultural impact of consumer products in general.
The second reason is that my parents are also entrepreneurs, but they operate in the boring high-tech manufacturing space, which is what I grew around and always hated. It was very boring. It was machines, chips, and boards, and I never want to be near it. To me, there was no doubt growing up that I wanted to be in something cool and cultural like consumer.
Finally, I went into social because I was really interested in Psychology, which is what I want to school for. All I did was do experiments or look at videos of other people doing experiments. I think Consumer Social products at their very beginning are just mere social experiments and running experiments is fun.
What do you think the different sides don’t realize about each other? Founders and investors.
I wasn't a great investor so I can't speak for the top-tier investors and what they can see with their experience and breadth od data logs. Andreessen or Lightspeed have mapped everything out. So, as an investor, I have to say that I just don't have a complete picture, but what I really didn't know as an investor was the value of a single percentage point.
As an investor, you're like: “Why isn't your day 30 retention at 25% instead of 20%?”, “Why aren't you growing at 110% month over month instead of 100% month or month?”. But when you start building you realize that even moving it by 1% or 0.1% is really really really hard. To an investor, it might just be a small number on an Excel sheet or on a memo. But for founders it’s 10 experiments that failed.
On the other side, most founders don’t understand that the bar is really really really high.
The bar for fundraising is always changing, but the bar for building an actual successful business is not. The bar for building successful companies has never changed. If anything has gotten harder, I think that's what founders don't realize.
Sure, you can raise a lot of money, sell secondary and get rich, but that is not the standard or the sign of a successful company. Right now it is really clear to me that the bar is just that high for fundraising right now because this is the requirement for a future successful company.
How did you get your first 1000 users?
I just made an announcement on my old startup’s Discord channel and sent DMs to people. It was like “come on I made a new app I think you would like it”. We were already internet friends. That is pretty much how we got the first 1000 users, and then we started doing TikToks for acquisition.
We started with a quantity-over-quality approach. I would make 6 to 8 TikTok videos every day across 3 accounts. Each would take sometimes as little as 5 to 10 minutes. Yes, we got some winners but those are usually not replicable, and if the format is not replicable, It doesn't matter. These random TikToks also make it so that your TikTok followers are not following you for the right reason.
My goal now is to make quality videos and reverse engineer what the viewers think. “If I'm a teen and I have these kinds of interests what kind of videos would I want to see?” After reverse engineering, I plug the app into the video in the most subtle way possible. I don't know if it's gonna work, but I'll let you know in a month.
If you were to start from scratch now, what are 3 things you're really happy that you already know?
One is “keep you simple”.
Actually, my co-founder just texted me that we should make the app simpler. Periodically go through all the parts of your product and make sure you're cohesive and very very simple and easy to digest. Even after learning this lesson, you’ll still make the same mistake with certain updates.
The second learning is “don't build in music”.
Music is my biggest passion, but it's just inherently a really really tough business environment to build in. The fact that in music you have to rely on Spotify and Apple Music or someone else's API just makes it so so so so much harder and riskier, so I'm glad to be out of that space.
The third lesson is: storytelling still works.
At the end of the day, in consumer, we want to be a generational-defining product. You're part of the culture and that requires storytelling. That's a skill most founders don't have but is really really important in consumer. I think the difference between BeReal and Locet It is just that BeReal is part of the culture and Locket is not.
Whether storytelling is something you can learn or just hire people to help you with I don't know, but it is a valuable skill to have. In a lot of ways storytelling is a mix of being good with humans and a master at information Architecture. You have to be a master at just general Communication. You have to be a master at visual communication. You have be a master at so many things. At scale.
What has been your biggest failure in Consumer social so far?
I don't think there was one. I wouldn't say the word failure. Yeah, I Really don't.
To me, in Consumer Social there are 2 stages:
One is post-product-market-fit, and the other is pre-product-market-fit. Most of the people I know and all of the products I've ever built are pre-product-market-fit. So am I failing? I don't know. I mean we’re having fun and growing, so I wouldn't call it a failure that apps like Decibel or the one that I had before didn’t work.
The only thing that I sort of regret - but don’t at the same time - is that we should have shut it down earlier. Even though I already had the gut feeling of getting out of the music industry in May, we only shut it out in September. However, without those four months of not knowing what was coming, I wouldn't hav met the people who are in the Sincerely team today. Everything happens for a reason. This process is painful, but I tend to forget the painful things anyway. You don’t have to love pain, you just keep on getting better at dealing with it.
What is one moment in your journey that you are particularly proud of?
So for Sincerely, we're targeting teens, and around 65% of our users are between the ages of 13 and 17, ut one moment in my journey that I'm particularly proud of is when we received a user-generated TikTok from a lady in her 60s.
It was really wholesome, and I don't even know how she came across the app. Maybe her grandkids told her about it. We've always envisioned Sincerely as a product that everyone can use, but seeing someone appreciate it organically without any targeting effort was amazing. The video wasn't even talking about the product in a big way. It was just a five-second video where she stitched or green-screened the app with a video and said, "You guys need to check this out. I've been using it for a couple of days, and I love it." It only had four likes. I don't know who she is, and she doesn't know who I am.
Sometimes the internet is magical in the way that it just connects people.
Another thing that I'm proud of is when I use the product myself. I read letters because I just want to see what people are saying. Some of the stories are just really touching, and having a peek at people's emotional state of being in such a raw and vulnerable thing is really inspiring.
What do you think the future of Consumer Social looks? Where are we heading?
If I say I know that would be a lie because I would be building it.
I'm sensing that teens crave authenticity and are even getting bored of Tiktok because everyone's following the same formula. There are 50 hooks you can use to get the first 1 to 2 seconds of watch time. At a certain point, teens are gonna start doing pattern recognition and they're gonna be like: “I know exactly what you're doing here. You're trying to manipulate me.” and I think the younger folks are already catching onto it. Authenticity is definitely a major trend.
Every app will have an AI component. It's just all gonna be on GPT4 and Microsoft is gonna make a lot of money. This trend is evolving really fast and I am not sure if it is positive.
Virtual pets are certainly also a trend, but I don't have a stand on it.
Find Zibo on Twitter and try out the Sincerely app on the App Store.