Variant Li Jin: Embracing Applications with Short Shelf Lives
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Variant Li Jin: Embracing Applications with Short Shelf Lives
Another path to success in consumer applications: creating a series of smaller, short-lived hit apps.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Li Jin
Translation: TechFlow
Introduction
In today's consumer app landscape, pursuing smaller-scale, short-lived hit applications may be a winning strategy. This article explores the effectiveness of this approach and analyzes how cryptocurrencies and tokens can amplify its impact.
Main Content
The rise of scaled social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has made direct competition increasingly challenging for new entrants.
According to network effects theory, any innovation created by a startup can be quickly replicated by existing networks and propagated across their large user bases. This is evident in the fact that while product innovations from new consumer social apps—such as live voice rooms and short-form stories—have been adopted by incumbent giants, no new consumer social app has achieved significant scale in years. As a result, startups have shifted focus toward more intimate formats where their smaller user bases offer them an advantage over established players.
At the same time, success for consumer apps has become increasingly fleeting, driven by accelerated news cycles and algorithmic feeds that constantly reshape user attention. New consumer apps may shine brightly for weeks or months, only to be quickly replaced by the next hot social app. In many ways, consumer products now resemble entertainment products—users frequently want to try the latest thing and then rapidly shift their attention elsewhere. Since 2016, I’ve been investing in consumer startups, and during this time, I’ve filled my iPhone screen with social apps—like BeReal, Poparazzi, Fam, and Dispo—all of which were once popular but are now mostly forgotten.
When niche apps gain attention and begin scaling, they may actually erode their core value proposition of intimacy, creating opportunities for newer entrants. Moreover, the novelty of a new, narrow social experience fades quickly, making it difficult to compete with established apps that offer broader social interaction options.
Given these dynamics, I believe another path to success in the consumer app space lies not in building a "do-everything" social giant, but in creating a series of smaller, transient hit applications. Instead of aiming to build one app that might one day reach a billion users, founders should launch a sequence of apps that rapidly capture attention.
This concept resembles the venture studio model: building and launching a continuous stream of products that share operational resources such as user acquisition and talent. In the casual gaming world exemplified by companies like Zynga and Supercell, developers release numerous games that share core mechanics but introduce incremental innovations to differentiate experiences. In gaming, quickly following up with similar apps and cross-promoting between them is crucial for retaining user attention and maximizing revenue.
Cryptocurrency Can Accelerate This Model
Cryptocurrency may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about advancing the venture studio model, but leveraging crypto can help connect different experiences and transfer user attention across application experiments.
Take NFT projects as an example—they guide users toward new products and generate revenue through sequential releases or experiences. For instance, after the initial 10,000 NFT collection, Bored Ape Yacht Club launched its Otherside metaverse and Dookey Dash—a platformer game and skill-based NFT minting experience. This progression, along with the sustained attention captured from token holders, demonstrates the potential of using tokens to bootstrap new projects. The shift in attention stems from genuine interest in seeing the ecosystem expand, as well as speculative interest driven by cryptocurrency incentives.
Unlike traditional game studios, where developers must build their own user base from scratch, tokens enable interoperability across different developers, allowing founders to build apps around existing tokens and draw users from other applications. Vampire attacks are a classic example of this: developers use token incentives targeted at competitors’ users (via on-chain data) to lure them away. More broadly, blockchain’s open data provides a foundation for creatively using tokens to drive attention—from Frame airdropping tokens to all users who paid NFT royalties to spark interest in its new NFT-focused L2, to Jenkins Valet building out and expanding an existing IP ecosystem.
Crypto-native apps can adopt a more systematic, venture-studio-like approach applicable across multiple emerging categories:
Crypto mobile developers are increasingly deploying their apps as PWAs (Progressive Web Apps)—lightweight applications that run on mobile web browsers, allowing developers to bypass crypto restrictions imposed by mobile app stores. While PWAs are easier to build and deploy, they can be harder for users to install and discover. Tokens can help users move between different PWAs, enabling developers to leverage the fast-moving trends in crypto. Rather than acquiring users from scratch for each PWA, developers can launch a suite of PWAs unified by a shared token.
This approach also taps into users’ interest in trending financial assets. For example, when the BONK meme coin gained traction in December 2023, the core team quickly launched BonkBot, a Telegram trading bot that rapidly captured 70% of the token’s trading volume. As memecoins—which are themselves a form of financial entertainment—proliferate, teams can continue capturing and extending attention through new applications built around the asset, such as Telegram bots, gaming experiences, and social apps.
Benefits of Building Multiple Apps
For founders, adopting a venture studio strategy offers greater optionality compared to betting everything on a single idea from the start. Launching a series of apps still leaves open the possibility of building a large consumer application—if one project succeeds, the founder can choose to scale it. Beyond that, this structure allows for greater autonomy and creativity. Since the goal isn’t to build a mass-market giant, each idea can be more alternative, fun, and niche.
To successfully execute this strategy, founders should keep several considerations in mind. First, embrace venture capital principles: recognize that success may come from one or a few breakout apps rather than an IPO of a massive social giant. Even with relatively small user bases, generating cash flow and becoming a self-sustaining business remains viable—especially in crypto, where even modest user numbers can lead to meaningful monetization (for example, Friend.tech generated $53 million in total fees from just 839,000 traders since its August launch last year). Equally important is retaining users not just through tokens, but also through content and community, to maximize per-user lifetime value. Finally, rapid execution and iteration are critical in this model—new apps should reflect the brevity of attention spans, capturing existing users while offering enough variety to keep them engaged over time. Of course, there are more nuanced decisions—such as how long to spend on each idea or how long to maintain each app—but these depend heavily on context, including app momentum, business considerations, and long-term strategy.
In today’s market landscape dominated by scaled incumbents, a viable alternative path for consumer entrepreneurs is to embrace the dynamics of ephemeral attention—building transient, niche applications and leveraging crypto technology to deploy tokens for promotion and growth.
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