Image source @Visual China
Text | Beluga whale goes overseas
On October 12, an anonymous Q&A App called Gas topped the US iOS free list. Interestingly, Gas has not been released globally so far, and even has only 7 states open in the United States ( Pennsylvania , Missouri , Illinois , Wisconsin , Ohio , Indiana and Michigan ), and on the 12th and before, its classification in the app store was a question-and-answer game, but this is actually an app that targets teenagers as the user group around high school social relationships.
is a bit off topic. Recently, we wrote 2 topics about anonymous/semi-anonymous social networking and found that they all like to go online to Q&A game categories. In addition to being relatively sensitive to anonymous social networking, it does reflect a product model that anonymous and semi-anonymous social products now tend to adopt. Official design questions and users' answers are limited to the scope of "personal name".
returns to the topic, that is, Gas won the first place in the US list when it is only open to some regions and has a narrow target population (the anonymous social apps used to be a college student group).
1 On October 13, Gas is still ranked 1st in the US iOS free list, and has put itself back into the social category targeted high school students. A App
Gas that blows rainbow bubbles to each other is not complicated to play. In the introduction to the app store, the core gameplay of Gas is summarized in just 4 sentences:
. Choose a school to join (high school only); . Add friends; . Officials push questions as soon as they come up (for example, who is the cutest), users answer questions, and "choose one more" among friends in a choice way, and users will not have nothing to do (i.e. Pick friends); . Wait for being picked (or the example above, you may be picked as the "cutest person" by others), and you will receive a notification when you are picked (only prompting the other person's gender and grade); . I don't know how you feel when you see the above gameplay introduction. The author instantly thought of the "confession wall" that was popular on campus during college, and is just Gas More private, it is a 1-to-1 version. Although the publisher's account is called Find Your Crush, the overall problem is more inclined toward the "friendly confession wall". In the user comments of Apple store, the most common keywords appear are "interesting", "comment" and "the whole school is playing". In fact, Gas is also positioning himself roughly like this - "an app that praises friends."
, and, significantly different from anonymous Q&A apps such as NGL and Sendit, Gas users cannot edit questions or send messages directly to other users. All questions are provided by Gas. In terms of gameplay design, almost completely avoids the harassment, bullying and other problems that users may encounter in the anonymous Q&A app in the past. The questions provided to users also fully reflect the characteristic of "love". Here are some of the following things that everyone has a little feeling: "Who's smile will melt my heart?", "Who most hopes to send me a message?", "Who is most likely to release a popular mixtape in the future", "Who is always there to accompany me?", "Who has the cutest smile?", etc.
In addition, Gas, which focuses on teenagers as the main target group, also has many cute and interesting small designs. For example, Gas introduces a "coin" mechanism, where users get coins by answering questions and picking friends, and using coins can make their names appear more preferred in the options of specific friends. means that users need to get coins by "praise" others, and coins will also give users a better chance to let friends see and be picked, and complete a positive cycle. In addition, in Gas, the problem that users are most picked by friends will be automatically displayed to the user's personal homepage, which gives the user's "light spots" a window to display in the application, thereby encouraging the user to continue playing.
At the same time, the "praise friends" community atmosphere created by Gas in the app also seems to make this anonymous Q&A App no longer seem so contradictory and embarrassing when designing monetization points with "revealing the answer". Because the user is forced to "expose", he has just changed from secretly praising people to "blatantly" praising people. In addition to promoting the warming of friends' relationships, there seems to be no obvious "side effects". Gas calls it God Mode, priced at $6.99 per month, and its main interests include the subscription period:
, unlimited prompts Pick the first letter of your friend's name; , view twice Pick the full name of your friend; , double coin reward; , receive a reminder when a friend sets a name to the user to display first; , enters a completely anonymous mode; As of October 13, Gas is ranked among the best-selling list of iOS social categories in the United States. 16. Judging from the results of the list, young users are obviously very curious about who is praising them and are willing to pay for them. changed to a skin and went online again. How long will Gas last for this time?
introduced this, I wonder if friends who follow the beauty list in daily life can notice that Gas's gameplay is very similar to the previous anonymous Q&A app called Simp. In fact, both apps come from the same release account. Simp also once came to the top 11 free list in the United States, but at the end of August it seemed that it was rushing off the shelves due to privacy and security issues, and Gas "just happens" to go online on August 27.
A user suspected that Simp is related to the crime of kidnapping and human trafficking
, in addition to the similar gameplay, the time of the on-off and off-shelf period is adjacent, Simp and Gas also have mutual echoes in the distribution strategies . Given Simp's "report and comments" murdered, Gas' open areas have consciously avoided Alabama and Georgia , which Simp had previously been involved in. At the same time, seems to be to avoid users connecting Gas and Simp in their first impressions . In less than two months, Gas changed its name 3 times and icon 4 times, with names ranging from Melt, Crush to Gas, and icon also ranging from bright pink purple to black orange. On September 30, Gas, after the completion of the "renovation", was officially launched, and in October, it expanded its open areas from Michigan to Pennsylvania, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. Finally, it topped the US free list on October 12, pushing anonymous Q&A to another climax.
Gas Three-time name change | Image source: Diandian Data
From opening up new regions to renaming and replacing icons, it can be said that everything is to make Simp "resurrect". , and whether it is Simp or Gas, the most curious features of this app are two. Why is targeting high school students and why is it adopting the "batch-open" distribution strategy in different regions?
Regarding the former, although anonymous social apps seem to be inherently more attractive to young users, in past observations, more anonymous social apps will choose college students with stronger consumption and generally adults, such as YikYak, Bump, etc. that Bai Whale has previously observed. Why did Gas adopt the issuance strategy of "opening in batches" in different regions? After all, for an anonymous social product that is very easy to get out of date and imitate, seizing the opportunity to seize users seems to be a more "wise" choice. Gas founder Nikita Bier has his own unique thoughts on this.
After 5 years, teenagers + anonymous Q&A
chose to enter high school students. The first reason is to save marketing costs .
Nikita Bier likes to share on social media. Based on his experience in social apps, for users in the age range of from 13 to 18, the number of invitations they send to friends will be reduced by about 20%. means that if you choose to build a social app for adults, you need to invest more in advertising. What you are seeing at the moment is that Gas does seem to be as Nikita Bier said, not investing much in advertising marketing.On third-party data platforms, Gas' buying data is almost impossible to capture; in terms of social media marketing, Gas' official account has not made many moves. Currently, Gas has only opened official accounts on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. Among them, the most popular one is the TikTok account, with 1,329 followers. So far, Gas has posted 6 videos on TikTok, with all of them viewing around 10,000. On the user side, there is also limited publicly visible discussion on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, where teenagers gather. means that the growth of Gas' user may all come from word of mouth.
The second reason is that the gameplay of teenagers + anonymous Q&A has been verified by the market. Nikita Bier is very confident that teenagers will like Gas gameplay. The earlier prototype of Gas/Simp was an anonymous Q&A product called thb launched in 2017 (also targeting high school students/teenagers as the main target group). Through some product pictures of that year, it can be seen that tbh and Gas/Simp are very similar, and tbh accumulated 2.5 million daily active users in less than 3 months.
can be judged from the iPhone model. The screenshot of the above product is from tbh, which was launched in 2017. It has a very high similarity to Gas/Simp.
. Not long after, tbh announced that it was acquired by Facebook, with an estimated price of US$100 million. It can also be seen from this expensive acquisition that Facebook once had high hopes for tbh, which is popular among the teenagers. However, like many short-lived social products, tbh was closed by Facebook the following year because of its "low usage rate". Judging from the result of Facebook's high price acquisition, tbh may be considered a successful product; however, the reality is that the long-term operation of tbh has become a problem, and the business model has not yet been completed (tbh has not started commercialization before it was acquired), and without much change in the product form, these problems encountered by tbh 5 years ago will be put in front of Gas again.
But the advantage of Gas is that it has begun to commercialize. The problem with Gas is that as an anonymous social app, it is a bit awkward to use "selling names" as a monetization point, so the official is also committed to building Gas into an "rainbow bubble" app to reduce risks. Combined with the low-cost thinking of this serial founder, let alone whether he can grow bigger and then withdraw. Overall, the pressure of running is likely to be low. The meme picture created by the
user for tbh, but obviously tbh has not existed for so long. Simp is overthrown and started over again. How can Gas win back the trust? The failure of
Simp is a failure of Nikita Bier to try anonymous social networking after 5 years. Obviously, the application is opened to users in various places in turn. This strategy adopted by Nikita Bier during the period of creating tbh was also used during the period of Simp. The probability of opening up by region is not a key factor in whether Gas can operate for a long time this time.
Considering that Nikita Bier was in a small team of only 5 people at that time, the team launched 15 products in 7 years, and none of them hit the market. When creating tbh, it was very likely that tbh was really testing it on a small scale with a try-out mentality. But now, Facebook’s generous bid for tbh five years ago should no longer leave Simp/Gas trapped by server resources, but it still chose to open it to users everywhere in batches.
In addition to product marketing considerations such as "hunger marketing" and "concentrated momentum", opening up in batches is likely to be a risk-sharing strategy adopted by the Gas team, which gives the product the opportunity to adjust when encountering problems in some areas, or even overturn it and start over.
Gas is positioned as an "anonymous Q&A application for teenagers", in which anonymous social networking and minors have always been extremely sensitive, which has led to such applications being very prone to explosion. Simp's closure originated from some rumors on social media about it selling user privacy and disregarding user safety. Since Simp has not yet released it to the United States, the scope of related rumors is limited, which also gives Gas a chance to make a comeback and start over.
Gas is launched this time, and more fully prepared for user privacy and security related issues. First of all, Gas spent a considerable amount of time on his official website to interpret the privacy policy and give users security suggestions; at the same time, Gas seems to be cooperating with media such as Threat.Technology, CPO Magazine, and Cybers Guards that focus on network security, and using media endorsement to win users' trust. Of course, it is not difficult to see that these actions are more for adults like parents and teachers. This is also a feature of teenagers' social products. not only needs to attract users in terms of gameplay, but also needs to make the user's guardian feel at ease.
Conclusion
Nikita Bier once shared a very interesting theory of "user density" on Twitter. User density is the only data metric he measured when judging a social app. He believes that "our users come from the world" is a red flag. In contrast, a product can achieve the iOS download Top1 list if it is only open in 1 state. review tbh, after watching the entire process of Simp being removed from the shelves and Gas being launched, we may have a deeper understanding of the "Flex" mentioned in the original text of Nikita Bier.
Of course, Gas, who has reached the top and is "flexible" enough, is also facing a crisis. Today’s Gas is difficult to follow the old path of tbh being acquired, because at this point, there are unlikely institutions that are willing to invest in a teenager’s anonymous social app. The trust issues that may break out in the short term and the long-term business model verification still require the team to overcome obstacles. As Nikita Bier said in a recent tweet in response to rumor, “I’m not sure how long Gas will run, but even if it only exists for a moment, I think it’s worth it.”
