Gettin' Shameless

Lapse's acquisition tactic takes it to no.1 on App Store, Spotify ships a social listening feature, Tubi launches AI-movie recommendations

Good morning! If you’re using Bard, be careful of including any sensitive info if you’re sharing the convo to others. Turns out Bard ‘shared conversations’ have been getting indexed by Google Search 🤣

🌶 Daily highlight 🌶

Lapse shipped an aggressive user-acquisition tactic that’s taken the app to no.1 on the U.S. App Store. The core product is a photo-sharing app, creating “camera rolls” of 36 shots that anyone in a chat group can add to 📷

What’s more interesting is Lapse’s onboarding process, which paywalls access to the app behind an invite flow. New users must first get invited to the app, and then subsequently need to invite 5 friends via SMS to get access to the app’s features 😱

As far as growth features go, this is really as aggressive as it gets.. While people may say that it’s ‘dirty’ and call for the app to be banned, breaking out as a new social app is very very hard, so credit where credit is due – kudos to the team.

♨️ Latest launches

Big tech

  • YouTube cuts its ad-free Premium Lite subscription plan

  • Google to kill Podcasts and transition users to YouTube Music

  • Spotify ships a social listening feature to jam with 32 friends

  • Apple Podcasts adds original content from Music and News+

  • WhatsApp beta tests an iPad version of its app

General and early-stage

  • Whoop adds a ChatGPT-powered health and fitness coach

  • PartyKit unveils a multi-player collab tool to embed in any app

  • Punchbowl revamped its UI to focus on standalone news stories

  • Tubi ships an AI chat-based movie recommendations feature

  • Valve releases a new VR version of its Steam platform in beta

🔍 Other good finds

  • Hit and miss. Sequoia’s take on act II of generative AI

  • Wolfpack. Streaming companies launch unified industry coalition

  • Join ‘em. Uber announces a major partnership with yellow cabs

🧈 Twitter nugget

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- Amol