2/12 Everyone knows TikTok. Few people ask why TikTok won while every other short video app failed. TikTok grew out of another product, musical.ly. Its two founders spotted the short video opportunity and built an app, and the one design choice that set it apart from every other short video product was subtraction: they stripped out everything else, let the video fill the whole screen, and made the next video one swipe down. That immersion and that dead-simple gesture brought in more than ten million users in a short time. Then ByteDance, which had the recommendation algorithm, copied the musical.ly format. musical.ly could not compete, so it sold and merged into TikTok, and both founders joined ByteDance.
What were the other short video products doing at the time? Most of them were thinking all-in-one. Weibo, China's Twitter, embedded short videos inside posts. Facebook embedded video inside the feed. So why did musical.ly win, and none of these all-in-one products?
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