Don't Build a Social Network, Build a Social Utility

Theory #21 | Not every social product should be a social network

We often think of “social products” as synonymous with “social networks,” but they’re not. Social networks are just a subset of social products, though arguably the most popular and lucrative kind that we also talk about a lot.

But I think it’s the wrong time to build a new social network. There’s something more compelling to build — something I refer to as a social utility.

Why not build social networks?

The current context is this: we’re in an era of legacy social network dominance and what feels like category saturation too.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X (fka Twitter) are the big players. And the barrier to durable entry for any new social network seems extremely high. We see this with the plethora of new apps that launch seemingly every day yet very, very rarely find a value proposition that sticks.

Eugene Wei’s famed Status as a Service outlines three dimensions to evaluate social product strength — social capital, entertainment, and utility. The essay focuses mostly on s…