BeReal + Voodoo
And a word about social consumer products...
I remember the first time I heard about BeReal, it was in March 2020, they had 500 users and back then I told Alexis that it was a cute sub-feature of Snap or Instagram but it really wouldn’t make a good venture-backed story.
Then in March 2021, Xavier (Niel) told me that his sons were using it daily with their friends. I reached out again. They had close to 50k daily active users and were growing nicely with a very strong retention curve. I started using the product daily with my closed ones while digging into their Amplitude dashboard. I was hooked, it wasn’t just something I wanted to play with, but a product I wanted to stick to. I really liked the reciprocity, the randomness, the simplicity, it was a daily check-in feature with friends upon which we could build so many things. We led their seed round, in April 2021, a €1.5M round at €8.5M post-money. Just for the record :)
Few weeks after, I sent over a set of KPIs to potential future investors. It didn’t take long (actually less than a month…) before A16Z and Accel decided to lead their next round in June 2021. At the time, the company had hundreds of thousands of daily active users with still a very strong retention curve. At the same time, Romain Salzman joined as COO to structure the company and lead their growth efforts in the US.
Six months passed with a lot of back-end infrastructure issues and latencies. It was really painful and frustrating. Early 2022, they were finally able to launch their marketing initiatives, notably in the US. They quickly grew to 2M daily active users when DST led their next round that closed mid 2022. In the meantime they were still growing very fast to a point where they reached 20M daily active users by end of 2022. You probably remember that amazing Saturday Night Live videos, it was the peak of gratification.
At the same time, celebrities were trying to get in and bring their followers, something that was unfortunately not possible, users were craving for more than just a daily check-in. We probably missed some of that momentum to be honest. During the whole year of 2023, the company released a lot of additional features to expand the scope of the product. It was really exciting to witness but also a bit frustrating.
While BeReal managed to get to 25M Daily Active Users with a solid base of users from not only various geography, but also demography (looking at you mom…), were we confident enough about our ability to make this incredibly huge? That was the question… You know the answer, from all the inbound interests we received from potential investors / buyers, we decided to take a safe path forward. Voodoo acquired Bereal for €500M.
I’m sure you all have an opinion about the product, the metrics, the strategy, what BeReal achieved and where we failed, and I wish we could run a simulation to show the land of opportunities we captured and missed. But history happens only once.
I feel immensely grateful for the ride so far and it’s just the beginning with Voodoo taking over. Over the past years, Alex Yazdi and his teams have demonstrated amazing abilities both in terms of strategy and execution and I really feel like BeReal has found a great home to reach its full potential.
Real social consumer products (and I am not talking entertainment à la Tiktok or what Instagram has become over the years…) often start with a single feature that capture the attention of the audience, express a strong sentiment that people want to repeat. Until they get bored and move on because those applications don’t serve as a home to nurture real connections on the long term.
It’s like you renting a place and organising parties versus owning a place and welcoming friends and family. Like AMO is doing. Social consumer is very much alive and its next generation is already hidden in plain sight :-)