In this segment of the My First Million podcast, Sam Parr and his guest discuss the concept of platform inflection—moments when a new app ecosystem opens up lucrative opportunities for developers. They illustrate this with historical examples like Facebook’s early developer platform, Pandora’s rise after Apple Store exposure, and the success of Snap Kit apps that have topped the App Store. The conversation emphasizes the asymmetric nature of betting early on such platforms: while many attempts fail, a few can dramatically change a creator’s trajectory. Building on this insight, the guest proposes a concrete product called “Cameo Kit,” a Snap Kit‑based service that lets users purchase personalized video messages from celebrities directly within Snapchat, handling payment and delivery without leaving the app. The idea aims to capture the existing Cameo market while leveraging Snapchat’s distribution and user experience, highlighting the need to keep the entire flow inside the platform to avoid competing with Snapchat’s core features.
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And that changed the trajectory of his life where Silicon Valley starts calling him and, you know, Naval flies him out to San Francisco and wants to invest in him and shit like that. So. So Snapchat's kind of pushing their chips into the middle of the table and saying, come build shit on us, we'll treat you better than those guys will. And you kind of believe it. You kind of believe it because it's really their only way to compete with Facebook and Instagram. So they kind of have to actually honor this. So anyways, a quick idea. So in general, I think that being early to these platforms and these app ecosystems is a good thing. There's been several Snap Kit apps that have been like number 1 and number 2 on the App Store, so they've gotten a shit ton of distribution from it.
What's a Snap Kit app?
Snap Kit is basically the toolset that Snapchat gives you to build, to build stuff. So it's like, okay, Snap Kit will say you want to access their Bitmoji, cool. Snap Kit lets you just Type one line and you get their Bitmoji character you can do stuff with. Snap Kit lets you use their whole camera with all their lenses.
I'm doing this course with Gagan, and a lot of the things we talk about are inflections. So what are inflections? And there's a variety of styles of inflections. There's technology inflections, which is basically like, oh my god, the internet is now in everyone's house. That is an inflection. There's an opportunity there. Or a belief inflection is like, Wow, people really don't trust the media. What can we build to help? Or people are afraid to be in groups of thousands of people. How can we fix that? What we are seeing right now is a technology inflection or a platform inflection. Platform inflection.
Yes.
And this is it. This is like when— so Pandora, the music company, Tim told me that the company was around for 3 years and it was doing horrible. And he said, they heard about the Apple Store. For some reason, Steve Jobs reached out to them and said, you guys might be a good, like, place to put your shit here. And once that happened, he was— and this, I don't know if it will be, but this is potentially one of those.
Yeah, these are asymmetric bets. Uh, sure, maybe most of the time these platforms either don't work out or there's nothing cool to build, and you'll waste, you know, a month of your time. Or you might catch a wave early and you might get to the top. So for example, the very first episode of this whole podcast chain is with Sui. And Sui talks about he was working at Microsoft and he realized he wants to quit and go start a company. He quits, he moves back home with his parents for like 2 weeks, and the first 2 weeks he's kind of bored. And the day he quit, basically Facebook did their developer conference and said, hey, we're making Facebook platform. Anyone can build an app on Facebook now. So he goes home and he's like, all right, I don't know if this is gonna be a business, I don't think so, but he's like, I just need to start programming again just to get my, you know, get, get the rust off. And so he builds a Facebook app that was stupid. It was like a superlatives app, like which of your friends is most likely to end up in jail or whatever. Boom, goes viral. Um, you know, he ends up with tens of millions of users and that changed the trajectory of his life where Silicon Valley starts calling him and, you know, Naval flies him out to San Francisco and wants to invest in him and shit like that. So He took a bet on the sort of day the platform launched. If I'm a, you know, board developer today, or I'm somebody who's got, you know, the ability to code and, you know, a weekend, I would be building something on top of Snap Kit. Um, the thing I would build is actually— so I think what's hard is when you want to build something that gets the user to leave Snapchat and come to your app. So you kind of have to build something that can actually do— the whole experience should just be on Snapchat, and it should not compete with what Snapchat does. So here's the idea.
Okay.
Yeah, I call it Cameo Kit. So basically, I think you could build the app Cameo on top of Snapchat. So you would basically— the Cameo Kit would just say, cool, I want to buy a Snapchat from one of these celebrities, and I'll pay you right here through Snapchat. And then I want to send it either to myself or to my friend on my Snapchat list. So basically, imagine I— it's your birthday coming up, right? When's your birthday? It's in Few days?
Yeah, you actually bought me a Cameo. You had Gilbert Gottfried call me a dickhead.
Right, so I did that last year, but this year I could do it through Cameo Kit, a little new invention of mine. So basically I would go in Snapchat, I would open it up, I would see a list of influencers that have Snapchat, which is like every celebrity in the world. I would request a video and I'd pay right there, and then you would receive a Snapchat from either from me or from them. In your inbox, and the whole Cameo experience could be built on top of Snapchat without having to have separate websites, separate apps, all that stuff, and you can compete with Cameo very quickly. So I think that's a very simple idea that could monetize on top of Snap Kit.
