Understanding the growth engine of Threads

Threads was built in 6 months, by (supposedly) a team of fewer than 20 employees, and after it's first week had 100 million users—making it the fastest growing app ever.

It's unsurprisingly really. Meta have a track record for shipping, scaling and monetising products to billions of users. 

They seem to have a playbook for cloning popular social features, with both Stories and Reels being more successful than Snapchat and TikTok, respectively.

In an attempt to reverse-engineer this secret Meta-sauce, I recorded and analysed the product as it evolved over it's first two weeks.

There's plenty to take inspiration from, so let's dive right in.