🔁 How ByteDance goes viral

It may not surprise you to hear that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is the most valuable startup in the world.

But TikTok isn’t the company’s only massive product.

ByteDance has 3 others that have eclipsed 100m+ daily active users: Toutiao (a news app), Douyin (TikTok’s predecessor), and Xigua Video (an online video platform).

How does ByteDance drop hits so consistently?

Per Harvard Business Review, the secret is ByteDance’s organizational structure — particularly how the company employs shared services.

While companies often share some resources (e.g., legal, HR), ByteDance takes it to another level. The company’s shared service platform (SSP) includes:

• Technology that can be used or customized across products (e.g., algorithms)
• Technical staff — like engineers and market analysts — who work on multiple projects instead of a single product line.

The goal of the SSP is to allow ByteDance product teams to stay small and focused on users, and to make it easy to apply lessons from one product to the rest of its portfolio.

Powered by its shared services platform…

… ByteDance has been able to pursue 3 seemingly contradictory strategies simultaneously:

• Broad exploration: In the span of 2 years, ByteDance created 140+ apps in app stores, spanning 11 verticals
• Rapid iteration: ByteDance moves fast — releasing products rapidly, terminating underperformers immediately, and cycling employees to new products as needed
• Selective focus: The company hones in on themes for years at a time — before going all-in on short-form video, the company focused heavily on text and photos

Paired with ByteDance’s data-driven culture, its SSP allows the company to leverage one insight into multiple breakthroughs. Case in point — a spike in video views on Toutiao led to the development of Douyin, and eventually to TikTok.

As a result…

… ByteDance has been valued as high as $400B by some investors. In 2021, the company reached 1.9B active users across 150 countries, and generated $58B in revenue.

The scary part? The nature of ByteDance’s shared services is that each product draws on success from the past — meaning TikTok might be just the beginning.

Today, more than war and death, younger generations are afraid of debt.

It’s one reason “Buy Now, Pay Later” platforms do ~$100B in sales and are growing at a 40% clip. “BNPL” is a friendly jingle, and the youths have taken the bait.

Unfortunately, data shows they’re struggling with the “pay later” part:

• In the U.S., 50%+ of Gen Zers and millennials say they’ve missed at least 1 BNPL payment.
• ~8% of the UK’s BNPL Gen Zers have been contacted by debt collectors.

Fortunately, regulators are catching on, and bureaus are now starting to follow BNPL activity on credit reports.

Martini. Printed, not stirred.

Bay Area startup Cana raised $30m in January to bring its “molecular beverage printer,” the Cana One, to life.

It’s a countertop device that can make thousands of drinks, including coffee and cocktails, using an ingredient cartridge.

Here’s how it works:

Every beverage, no matter if it’s a seltzer or a fine wine, is mostly water.

And just ~1% contains the compounds that give it its unique flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel, Cana CEO Matt Mahar told The Hustle. For example, tartaric acid is key in winemaking, while quinic acid gives coffee its acidity.

But while a glass of wine might contain ~400+ unique compounds, we humans can only register ~30-50.

Cana identified ~150 ingredients that comprise those compounds and concentrated them into a cartridge.

When users choose a drink…

… the cartridge dispenses ingredients in ~30 seconds and mixes them with water.

Also inside the Cana One are a CO2 cylinder for carbonated drinks and 2 additional cartridges: one with liquid sugar, and another with neutral grain alcohol. Users can customize drinks’ sweetness and potency.

The goal is to reduce waste

The soft drink industry alone is estimated to produce and sell 20B-34B plastic bottles per year.

Cana’s cartridges last about a month (or ~200 drinks). New ones auto-ship when customers run low, while old ones are recycled.

Consumer cost is significantly more upfront. Machines are $799 (or $499 for the 1st 10k orders). Cartridges are free, but an app tracks and charges per drink — ~$0.29 for a seltzer to $2.99 for a cocktail.

Yet costs are typically 25%-50% cheaper than stores — not to mention bars, cafes, and restaurants — so big-time LaCroix guzzlers and party hosts would break even sooner than later.

But… is it tasty?

Apparently! A CNET writer found samples to be “quite good, if different,” while TechCrunch said samples had bold flavors with smooth finishes.

And now, here’s a supercut of how we imagine Cpt. Jean-Luc Picard would use the Cana One.