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It's hard to grow as a social media startup now. If you're successful, Zuckerberg and the rest will spend tens of millions cloning you.

Only a select few reach escape velocity. Snapchat, TikTok.

How do you survive without being trampled by the giants?

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You focus on things people aren’t willing to post on their Facebook feed. Snap and TikTok remain strong despite being copied because it allows people to essentially shitpost without their close friends and family seeing it.

I wonder how VSCO is faring compared to Instagram, which is another similarly "anti-social" network. TikTok has the benefit of being owned by a larger conglomerate, ByteDance. Supposedly Pinterest was in talks to acquire VSCO.

You can't. They can spend 200 engineers to study everything about your product and clone it. And it won't even make a dent in their revenue.

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