(We originally posted this in 2020. You can read more of our original ideas in our archive.)
Problem: Earlier this week, Twitter launched stories with Fleet, and the media world went crazy.
Twitter launches 'Fleets' story feature. Users aren't sure how to feel. (nbcnews.com)
Twitter Launches New Feature: Disappearing Tweets Called Fleets – NBC New York
Twitter Launches Fleets That Disappear After 24 Hours | Digital Trends
With so many apps now doing stories, essentially the same way, Mark Fiorentino brings up a great tongue-in-cheek point about a potential unicorn company: multiple-story cross-posting.
Solution: This business would enable a way to cross-post content on a variety of different social media channels while also developing an easy-to-use method for creating elegant and sleek content. Given the “rise of the story” this business would be a business that capitalizes on a trend across social media stories.
A bit of history as explained by AddThis:
First introduced to the public in 2013, Stories was solely a feature on the Snapchat platform. The idea was to allow users to create a longer narrative of pictures strung together by adding their Snaps to a feature called their “Story.” They would be available for 24 hours for followers to watch.
In 2016—in what became a highly criticized move—Instagram launched its own Stories feature to compete with Snapchat. It was a bold move, but according to Vox, launching Stories was the best decision Instagram ever made. Since launching Stories, Instagram says over 500 million people are using it per day—surpassing Snapchat by more than double. It has fundamentally changing the way people share and consume content online.
Once Facebook-backed Instagram entered the game with its own copycat version of Stories, the expansion continued to the rest of Facebook-owned products, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This fueled the format’s rapid growth even further. The blogging and publishing platform Medium launched its own take on the Stories format with “Series,” followed by Skype’s “Highlights” (which it eventually scrapped in 2018) and Google-owned YouTube’s “Reels” in late 2017.
There are a few interesting competitors in the space:
Once: A Shopify storefront optimized for mobile. The startup is trying to funnel e-commerce traffic into mobile purchases, which is not currently as seamless as the desktop experience. By using Instagram stories, Once has created 12 mobile storefronts. The flagship customer has increased conversation rate by 70 percent. They were part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 Demo Day.
Similarly, Canva recently Instagram Story Editor and Crello has created a product based on “the fast and fun way to create Instagram stories.”
Another business that builds off the story infrastructure is Polly (YC S17, also at polly.ai) which is self-described as “a social polling app for Snapchat and Instagram stories.”
The business would focus on capturing the market of stories and build out the infrastructure required to create flashy stories across platforms, share this content across platforms, and receive telemetry or data on engagement across platforms.
Monetization: Selling this platform.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)