gas 🔥 - rise of wholesome social

We live in a noisy world, our attention is often getting pulled in every direction by our devices and we feel more isolated than ever. So how do you create engagement loops that encourage more positive and healthy behaviour that allows us to create more honest conversations while retaining the popularity of short-form content?

One of the newest social trends is searching for an answer and gaining traction quickly. Make room on your home screen for the rise of wholesome social.

At a base level, how do you measure the success of an app? What are the leading indicators? Let’s look at the core metrics. Engagement, Retention, Adoption and Monetisation. Early in social media, the name of the game was adoption, acquiring users as quickly as possible as the world transitioned online and onto mobile. Then the age of engagement was revolutionised by the concept of infinite scroll and algorithmic suggestions. Only then do companies consider things like monetisation through advertising and other data practices. Retention is often a second thought, if you’ve created a viral app you're acquiring far more users than you’re losing, all to reach the nirvana that is labelled ‘network effect’. We can almost see a half-life maturation of the current generation of social apps.

So how is wholesome social any different? In traditional social media, the loop is centred around the concept of a one-to-many connection, getting as much engagement from as many people as possible. Wholesome social takes a different approach it’s not about winning the majority of your time and competing at an engagement v time metric. Wholesome social is driven by retention, driving offline connection to a hyperfocused action. It’s not about consuming as much time as possible it's about driving action with high intent. I will open an app to do X, rather than subconsciously consume content.

In current mobile social, the gap between a content creator and a content consumer has never been more significant. Creators are pressured to create better and better content for a user base that consumes their content because they want to do nothing. I think companies like youtube have continued to do so well in the market environment because discoverability in comparison is relatively low, and retention to subscribed channels has become an increased priority.

So which companies are driving wholesome social?

ngl

Launch date: Nov 2021Growth: 50m downloadsSubscription model: USD$6.99Revenue: $3m+ from In app purchases (IAP)Team size: 3 people

NGL stands for Got Gonna Lie and is an anonymous Q&A social app between friends. Started ex-employees of another popular social extension app creator Sendit. NGL isn’t new to controversy after getting in not water with apple for charging people for hints about the sender that was actually engagement farming from the app creators themselves, not real user-to-user interaction.

Gas

Launch date: Aug 2022Growth: 1 in 3 US teensRevenue: USD$2.2m in Oct-Nov.Team Size: 4 people

Gas is the biggest contender in the wholesome social space yet. It's an anonymous polling app between friends, using the beachhead market of launching in high schools across the US. Nikita Bier founded tbh (basically the same app as gas) which was later acquired by Facebook.

Its monetisation is nothing to be scoffed at either, in the last 30 days it’s in the top 20 of non-game generating apps across mobile social networks.

Gas's core principle of focusing on acquisition and monetisation is key. How do you ship features that build the best core gameplay loop early? Why complicate building messaging or profile features when it doesn’t attribute to growth?

bereal

Launch date: 2020Growth: 50m+ downloadsRevenue: 0Team size: ~100

bereal has been blowing up lately, and authentic + spontaneous social is another sub-trend of wholesome social to keep on your radar. No filters, a 360 view of your life at a random time during your day. Driving users intend to pick up their phones and share their lives with friends outside of planned events and good times.

Locket Camera

Launch date: December 2021Growth: 20m downloadsRevenue: NATeam size: less than 20

Locket takes advantage of something I love as an investor, products owning space on the internet. Allowing you to share pictures via a widget on your home screen with your close friends. By passively allowing you to consume content it owns effectively 4x the space on your home screen of any other app, and bypasses open rates and competition that other apps need to build habits for.

circles (twitter)

It would be remiss to not include what incumbents are also doing in the authenticity and wholesome social space. Twitter recently introduced circles for people that you most actively engage and have a mutual connection with. It also allows you to curate and tweets out to a smaller audience.

close friends (Instagram)

Close friends work largely the same on Instagram, often defaulting to a more authentic small circle of friends where you share more unedited moments of your life.

The key here is these apps are moving away from one-to-many connections of the relationship of content creator vs consumer and want to build connections that people want to foster and build upon.

Social media has largely relied on the network effort and the large motes that have built-in companies like Facebook, TikTok and Reddit and more, will this next generation of more wholesome companies be able to build a greater retention and monetisation model by innovating on the lonely filtered online world?