What if you put the authenticity of a podcast in a social framework? These days, you’d get the new and buzzy, Air Chat. Actually, Air Chat launched about a year ago. And, the not-first-to-market, talk-first app fell on deaf ears. Then, a couple of big hitters in the tech world revamped it and relaunched it. And, voila, you can hear the buzz.
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This is an idea near and dear to my heart. And my ears. I launched a very similar and, I dare say, better thing about four years ago. Unlike Naval Ravikant who started AngelList and Tinder’s head of product, Brian Norgard, I have no pedigree. So, my app, ililli ← the name means “listen to me,” in Lebanese, the letters look like a soundwave, and you pronounce it EYE-lilly → got very little of the press love it needed to grow.
We don’t talk about founder pedigree in startups, but man, having a name that excites press sooooo helps when you’re starting something that you hope will be bigger than a breadbox.
Like ililli, Air Chat is all about talk. If you buy the premise, you believe that talk overcomes a couple of fundamental obstacles central to social media. And, media in general.
First, you can hear what people say instead of reading it. I know there are some GREAT writers out there who can use words to paint pictures. For them, it’s two steps down and one to the left to create atmosphere with text. Most of us need the inflection that comes from saying words out loud.
Second, it’s a lot harder to fake voice. Yes, AI gets you close. But if you’ve heard Siri give you driving directions, then you know, “Turn left at the next left,” wasn’t voiced by a human. This matters because bots run rampant on Twitter/X and so many other platforms. Let’s not kid ourselves, Twitter built bots as a feature. It’s never been a bug. “Hey look, I created a bot that will retweet any reference to crypto.” No one is going to waste time creating artificial traffic for a platform made around humanity’s first medium.
Let’s not stay here for just a moment.
I’ve never really understood the fascination with social media. No, really. If I send a text to my brother, it’s for him. Stuff like, “Be there in 5.” Or, “Here’s a great article from the Athletic about the Steelers might take in round one.” He’s a Steelers fan. I don’t get why I would put that on a public message board.
Twitter made it possible to text from computer to phone; and, across different carriers. But no one was really thinking, “Hey, I desperately need to be part of a giant asynchronous message board with no rules.” Maybe that’s why it took two years before people took to it. For me, the same issue stands for every social social platform. Here, I’m excluding things like WhatsApp. Which is still used mainly for old-school one-to-one and small group messaging.
In some ways, that may be why social is moderating down to what we used to call publishing. We have mega-publishers, the superstars with big followings. In the parlance of publishing, that would have been Time, or Life, or People or Sports Illustrated. The Kardashians and Neymars and Mr. Beasts fill this role. We had second-tier publishers and enthusiast titles. It’s the same here for countless accounts. We have news. Again, it holds. Essentially, people with big audiences are using social media as a one-to-many platform. Facebook plays the part of a printing company and the much-maligned USPS.
OK, vent over, we’re back on track.
Social platforms became the place to share — publicly — the media we could easily create. We could text. We put our texts on Twitter. We could take pictures on our iPhone. Instagram. We could format resumes. LinkedIn. We could shoot video on cameras. YouTube. We could shoot video on phones. TikTok.
Right now, audio is a mess. Try to share an MP3 on Twitter. It has no idea what to do with it. Same goes for LinkedIn, YouTube, and just about every other place we congregate. We need a place to share (and by that I mean distribute) home-grown audio.
Now, let’s delve into the easy creation part. It’s too often overlooked. I can text easily. If I knew what I was doing, I could take pictures and videos easily too. Audio is a pain. It’s sort of baked into iMessage but when you send an audio note, it disappears. Considering that an audio file is one-one-millionth the size of pictures and audios, that makes no sense. But delete is the very finicky default for audio messages on iPhones. Fleeting seems be core to audio media. Which may be why it doesn’t persist as a medium.
There’s no but coming. There’s just more ands. And… audio is portable. And… audio, in tiny blob form, can support ads between the posts — unlike podcasting where ads are attached to each specific file (show/episode). Don’t even get me started on the lack of data you get from podcasting. More on this another time. For now, suffice to say, podcasting may seem digital, but from a data perspective it’s very much an analog media. Like old videos sent to a TV studio and played.
I am a BIG believer that audio — to be clear, digital audio — should have a seat at the big people table of media and social media. It makes way too much sense to be relegated to after thought status.
Our team tried. But, a bootstrapped startup pushing a rather large boulder up a rather large hill lacking the benefits of a name-brand CEO was too much to overcome. We got some press. We got some users. But we could never get the momentum ililli needed to push through the typical startup challenges.
Still, I’m proud that we tried. No. What we built. An idea. A product. A community. Really proud. I may be more proud of our pivot to a business space where we generate revenue and run a profitable social platform. Which is more than I can say for Snap or Pinterest.
I know what the AirChat folks are up against. Social is a tough space these days. Outside of and because of the behemoths, it’s much more difficult than it was ten years ago. You need to do something other social platforms aren’t doing AND that something has to something that people want. If it’s a format people like, the big players: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube will copy it and roll it out fast — see short-from video. If you need more than a little time to get rolling, it’s going to be hard to get VCs to keep backing you. The last example I can think of is BeReal. It got real beeg but didn’t (ok, hasn’t) overcome the massive gravitational suck it takes to fly in the vacuum of space.
A few weeks back, Artifact shut down. Actually, Yahoo sort of bought it. No one really knows what happened. I called it’s time of death last August. What we do know is it offered nothing new and was destined to fail. But, since it was founded by the two guys who started Instagram, it got a ton of press. Press helps. So, AirChat is already doing better than we did.
Hopefully, the guys who started AirChat can leverage their press and the freshness of their idea to get us all talking! Because we should be heard in the vaccum of social space.