Nir's live stream Meerkat on March 17 2015

Check out Meerkat. Super cool. And now they can comment. What pancakes did you order? What pancakes did you order, Ray?

I had the butter. What did I have? The butter and cream.

Let me look. Yeah, he had some kind of waffle I had here. Yeah, I'll show you what I had. It won't look that good on camera, but that's what I had. Had the Colorado omelette.

How did you know we had pancakes?

We are in because we're at ihop. I just said it and I. I'm in Cambridge for a session tomorrow, a conference about digital payment systems. And my buddy Ray here, who I've known for quite a while, we actually met at BJ Fogg's boot camp, Behavioral design boot camp. And now Ray is building a new startup and.

Yep.

So I've been doing these AMAs on Meerkat for a few days now. And can I tell you how happy I am that Meerkat is exploding? It's really awesome how big this app is getting. Does anybody know, by the way, how big Meerkat is these days? If you know, if you've seen any stories, I don't know how many downloads they've had, but if you know, if you've seen any stories. I also posted a YouTube video on my blog. If you want to see an interview with Ben Rubin, the CEO of Meerkat, check out my YouTube page. You can see what some of his early thoughts on how he designed the product. This was only day seven when he did the interview with me on YouTube. But yeah, if you have any questions you want to ask, anything. Can you hear me? Okay, somebody give me a shout out. Let me know if you can hear this, okay? And feel free to retweet. I always appreciate retweets so we can get more people on the conversation. Oh, you guys are going to Ted, that's awesome. Hope you guys have a great time there. I'm not visiting Harvard. I am in Cambridge at conference. Meerkat has 111k users. So here's a question for you. How long until Meerkat goes from. I think somebody said here, Mike said that they have 111 users. Does that mean installs or daily actives? I'm guessing installs. How long does it take for them to get to a million? What do you guys think? How long? What do you think? How long do you think?

When did it launch?

They launched about what, 20 days ago.

20 days ago.

And they got a 111,000.

11,000, I said some kind of power curve. Right.

Yeah. I mean, there's definitely. They will definitely be. This will. This will be exponential because it still. It still pushes out. So every time we start a new meerkat, right, it pushes out to your. Your Twitter stream. I'm thinking it's gonna take another two weeks.

Two weeks.

I say two weeks. So total, that'll be 40 days to get to a million people. That's my guess. Who knows? What do you guys think? You guys think two more days? Nishant thinks two days until they become a million install app. So we have 35 people listening, which you guys. Okay. So Mike thinks installs give Meerkat another month. Yeah, I would say that's about right. Which is pretty freaking amazing. Right? It's just. So what I love about the bro. So Ray was asking me earlier, what's the big deal about meerkat? How did they get to do what they did as opposed to apps like Ustream and Qwikt? I mean, there's been so many live streaming apps that just didn't go anywhere. I think one, the fact that it's just so easy to start this. I mean, do you see how easy it was? Like one button, right? And what Ben Rubin said when I interviewed him about why he did that, it's fascinating. Everybody thinks that they utilize Twitter as a growth channel, but it turns out that wasn't actually their intent. They utilized Twitter because they wanted to give the broadcaster immediate reward, right? Like instant gratification. Any other live streaming tool, you say something, oh, I'm here. Nobody's. Nobody's around. Oh, that. You know, I'll just talk to myself for 30 minutes.

Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires. Yeah. Hey, Juan, thanks for tuning in. Whereas with this, with Twitter, the fact that, like, you know, just even with a few Twitter follows, you instantly get somebody watching. And with one button, right? That action phase of the hook, making the simplest behavior in anticipation of reward. This is rewarding, right? Seeing 43 people watching us blab here.

And that's. That's the most important role on this for something like this in the beginning, people that are willing to broadcast, Right?

That's what he wanted. Ben knew that it wasn't about just watching that he wants people to broadcast when there's something interesting to see, something interesting to say. By the way, somebody said here there was a rumor at south by Southwest today that something. So Satis. Houston, tell us the something. We can't see it. So that what, that Twitter did something? I think so.

If you Twitter shut them down, right?

No, no, Twitter didn't Shut them down. Because how would all these people be here? What they did, the social graph, they shut down. But see, I don't think they. I don't think they'll. They won't need it. I think they're going to build their own social graph because it's nice. Don't get me wrong, it's very nice that you can port your social graph over, but I don't think they require anymore because it still has that component of quickly pushing out. But I do think, right, it's the immediacy of reward. So I think you're gonna see a ton of apps doing what they did to get this immediate reward. So you're gonna see a lot of spammy apps going to Twitter now as this tool to pull people in. And thanks for tuning in. Look, we got people from New Zealand.

That's awesome.

Say, hey, Kaylin. Hey, Kaylin. Slow graph versus fast graph. I think that's exactly right. So somebody Hunter walk posted around this slow graph versus fast graph, and I think they. They tried to do the fast graph, and now they're going for the slow graph of building their own.

What's the difference between a slow graph?

I think I just have heard this secondhand, but I think the whole slow graph versus fast graph is. The fast graph is like porting over somebody else's graph. Right. And the slow graph is building one your own. I may have gotten that wrong. So correct me if I got that wrong. Oh, another thing that's really great here is that it's all ephemeral. So when I push stop. It goes away.

It goes away.

So what does that do to your discretion of, oh, my hair doesn't look right.

And I'm not sure the video goes away or.

Yeah, it's gone. I can save it if I want to. Okay, but you can't say. I mean, it's not automatically saved, right?

Okay.

And so you can say whatever you want. So again, back to the hook and the ability curve, right? Fog's ability curve. What does that do to the ability to post when I know it's not shared? When it's not saved, it's a Snapchat effect. But what now? The big controversy and what everybody was talking about at south by was that Twitter bought Periscope, which is a direct competitor. And so who knows? I mean, that could be a deal killer, right? That Twitter can now change. Meerkat's not doing anything wrong right now, but they can change the terms of service to make Meerkat have a really hard time.

So Without Twitter, they can't have that immediate gratification.

Right.

They can't distribute immediately and bring people in. Could they do that over Facebook?

Now that's what I was wondering. Why isn't Facebook chomping at the bit and trying to get one of these companies? You should have a similar effect. Now, I pull a lot of traffic from Facebook as well. It doesn't go out, but because I have an IFT recipe that everything that I post on Twitter also goes out to Facebook, I do draw traffic from Facebook.

Is a smaller graph for your graph?

No, I think it's big.

Your friends?

I don't know. Actually it's a good question.

Oh, you have followers on Facebook.

Right.

Okay.

So you should see it in the stream as well. But who knows? Ryan Cooley in an interview today. This is according to rh who's rh Cool interview today. Sounded like they might leave Twitter altogether. Huh? It's interesting. I'm reading some of the comments here. Give me just a second. Snapchat. And WhatsApp was slow growth doesn't mean slow. Oh, slow graph doesn't mean slow growth. Right, exactly. That. The difference in fast graph and slow graph is not slow growth versus fast growth. It's how you build your graph. I mean, it's just like what WhatsApp did or Instagram did. Right. First Instagram borrowed the Facebook graph.

Right.

And then they built their own graph so that Facebook eventually had to buy them because they were trying to pull away that, that is that essential habit of posting video, I mean, posting pics. Okay, so let's see, we got 49 people. Any other questions? Anybody have anything on their mind about habit forming products? Ray, why don't you talk about what you're building. Actually share with us what you're building.

Yeah, sure. I'm building a new startup called who Quest and it's a. I would say that it's a smarter, more useful version of LinkedIn endorsements. So we are in a way building a, I guess fast graph on top of Facebook.

Okay.

So we're borrowing the Facebook graph and we are allowing people to essentially endorse each other for various skills and traits. And we service that as sort of positive reputation that can be, that can create a layer on the Internet so that next time you want to meet somebody, you get to know who they are.

So every time someone wants to ask about another person, it pushes out to their face to everyone's Facebook account.

They can choose to have it pushed out.

Okay. Yeah. To ask their social graph whether like what kind of questions would somebody ask?

Well, it's actually right now we're doing questions that are more.