The story of Meerkat: how to take off with the help of a third-party platform and suffer from it

The Meerkat app has become one of the most talked about startups in recent weeks, spawning a wave of interest in video streaming using mobile devices. However, it is interesting in another respect: his example shows that tightly linking your service with a popular foreign product can be both the most important competitive advantage and the Achilles heel.


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Meerkat was actively spoken about at the beginning of March: a mobile application that made it easy to broadcast what was happening around was gaining momentum at a tremendous speed. Whereby? Partly, the right time has come: the spread of LTE-Internet and the improvement of cameras in smartphones have reached the point where it has become possible to conduct high-quality broadcasts on the go. However, services for this have existed for years - why did a newbie suddenly go around them?

The success of Meerkat is explained by how closely the creator of the app has linked it to Twitter. The idea was as follows: users log in using their Twitter accounts; automatically subscribing there to the same people they are following on Twitter; when the user starts the broadcast, the application automatically publishes a tweet about it, and the audience comments on what is happening with twitter replays. Twitter is known as a platform for what is “happening right now”: when a user has something amazing unfolds before his eyes, he writes a tweet about it, not a Facebook post. When the user gets the opportunity, as if in the same service, to show everyone this clearly in real time, this combination feels very natural. The ideology of the projects is well combined: both of them strive not to push as many functions as possible into the interface, but to remain simple and understandable services that perform the simple task well.

As a result, when Meerkat began to rapidly gain popularity, two services began to seem the perfect combination. Many people talked about the fact that Twitter should have bought Meerkat on its own and made it its part. But even if he doesn’t buy it, it’s obvious that he should be very happy with the project that makes people use Twitter more actively, right?

It turned out wrong. Looking at what is happening, Twitter really bought the videotape application the other day - but not Meerkat, but a similar Periscope project, which is in beta stage. And then, a few hours after the announcement of this purchase, limited the possibilities of Meerkat: now you can not subscribe to all your twitter-friends automatically through the application. That connection, due to which the new project took off, was partially destroyed. This does not make Meerkat meaningless, but limits growth opportunities.

Founder of the project does not despair and intends to cheerfully act further. However, in a situation where Twitter will implement its own solution for the same purposes and will obviously play up to its own version, the future is a big question. In part, we have already passed this with photos: when Twitter had no own photo hosting site, users willingly resorted to third-party projects for posting pictures, but now they don’t even remember about them.

Although it is still not clear how the story of Meerkat will end, it has already become indicative in two respects at once. On the one hand, it shows how a startup can get rapid growth, “sitting on the tail” of a larger project. And on the other hand, it is clear that this inevitably makes the project dependent on a large one, and the sad fate may turn out to be predetermined by one decision of the giant, which will be impossible to influence.