The New Beta
Dispo and the new wave of social apps
Welcome to issue #3 of the Product Colour newsletter. My apologies for the radio silence, it’s been a crazy few weeks. In the time since the last newsletter issue, I started in my role at SnapScan, was in hospital for an operation, and yeah just generally been trying to survive in a pandemic. The topic of this week’s newsletter is the new Beta.
The new Beta
I’ve seen a shift in how consumer products are launching in the market, and this insight was sparked when I saw US Twitter users tweeting about invites to the hot new social app Dispo.
Dispo joins a new wave of social consumer apps utilising an invite system to create demand and hype before launching. Essentially, you can only get access to the app if somebody in your network who’s already on the app invites you. Once you’ve been invited, you can then also invite others in your network.
At first I thought this method was restrictive as it excludes a lot of users as well as the entire Android platform, but I think this playbook will be in place for the next wave of social apps we see entering the market. This new approach was most recently popularised by Audio drop-in app Clubhouse.
Clubhouse appears to be starting to open up access more as they scale, but they are still in Beta and you still need an invite to join (and it’s still iPhone only). They’ve released a lot more invites to the community over the last week.
In the case of Dispo they’re still in very-early Beta, with the app not available on the App stores yet. The Beta is running through Apple’s TestFlight program, which has generally been used by internal product and development teams, but more and more also for running Betas with external users. Last night they announced that they reached the TestFlight limit of 10 000 users. A great problem for any product team to have.
As things stand, even if you have an invite you are now unable to join the Dispo Beta until they release the app in the App store (or TestFlight increases their capacity). This will likely only lead to even more hype and demand for access to the app.
Note: There are 2 Dispo apps. The original Dispo app that exists without a social component, which you can download from the Apple App store now. Then there is the new Dispo Beta app with a social component that’s not available yet in the App store and can only be access through TestFlight.
Dispo and the new wave of social apps
Having used Dispo the last 3 days, I’m blown away by what the team is building. I can’t share screenshots, as part of the Beta guidelines request users not to share the UI, but I can give some early first impressions without going into too much detail.
This is not Instagram. There’s no filters, you can’t post pictures from your phone’s library (they have to be taken in real time), and it comes with an important shift in focus encouraging users to live in the moment. All pictures you take and post on Dispo ‘develops’ only becomes available the next morning at 9AM. This is to mimic the feeling of days gone by where you would print pictures and only see them a few days later. It is magical!
It doesn’t have a traditional home feed like Instagram, and instead makes use of shared film rolls, which is where pictures are posted. The idea being you can create film rolls and invite friends to populate them with you. That’s about as much detail I can go into without breaking any of the Beta rules.
Dispo is part of a new wave of social apps, that includes the likes of Realtime, Texts and Sonar. I believe these apps are going to completely change the way users interact with social apps. The new wave is here.
Invites are the new social currency
Lastly, just a note on how I think invites are emerging as the new social currency. They can be used to impress friends, colleagues and your network. In some cases invites can even be used to make money by selling them to users with FOMO - although I think selling (and buying) invites is crazy.
Thank you. Until the next issue, take care.