Finding Market Fit: Marketing Leaders in Tech The Yik Yak story. Building thriving communities across college campuses | Brooks Buffington (Yik Yak Co-Founder) and Justin Oh (Yik Yak Product Marketing Lead)
Yik Yak is a psuedoanonymous social media platform primarily focused on on-campus college students. Yik yak first launched in 2013 and at it’s peak hit about 7M Monthly Active Users and about 2.5M daily active users, spending roughly 30 minutes per day on the app. They consequently raised north of $60M. But the app hit a ceiling with growth and in 2017, unfortunately, was sold to Square. The name and logo have since been purchased from Square in 2021.
Justin led product marketing at YikYak and was one of the first employees. Brooks is one of the co-founders, and has since gone on to build another startup, Switchyards, which is a neighborhood work club. Justin has gone on to lead Product Marketing at Discord.
We talk about:
- How Yik Yak got started
- Building engaged communities on and off platform
- Dealing with challenges like bullying and negative content
- Difficulties of expanding markets
- Building a great culture
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Where to find Brooks and Justin:
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Where to find Patrick:
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(3:12) How Yik Yak got started
(6:37) Driver of immediate growth and access to an immediate audience
(7:40) How the app quickly scaled
(9:28) Initial engagement metrics and awareness compared to Twitter, Instagram, and Snap
(13:31) Why copycat apps never hit it as big
(16:30) Initial tools and guidance in building the right community
(19:35) Honing in on authentic content
(25:00) Sparking growth through onsite events through identifying campus influencers
(29:48) Why everyone loved the Yak on campus, developing new experiences, and hitting the tipping point before engagement starts to run on its own
(40:42) Addressing bullying, high school campuses, and the negativity of certain campuses
(44:23) Limited upside and not much incentive for allowing negative content to persist
(46:11) Marketing's role in driving growth and its limitations
(48:37) The challenges of natural churn and turn over due to graduating seniors
(50:00) The shared feed across thousands of students loses its novelty over time
(51:19) How the college experience is a shared experience and the difficulties of expanding use cases beyond that
(55:41) Catching lightning in a bottle at that time
(56:55) Trying psuedoanonymity and micro communities
(59:12) Looking back at the company culture