July Dean Magazine: July 2023

M Y R O N J . C L I F T O N
D R . M Y R O N J . C L I F T O N
Spill was founded and is owned by Alphonzo “Phonz”
Terrell and DeVaris Brown. Spill, with a team of former
Twitter employees, directed their marketing efforts and
key influencers square into the middle of Black Twitter by
using the language and phrases familiar to Black people —
Visual Conversation at the Speed of Culture.
that have different menus, different decor, different
atmospheres, different clientele, and different prices.
You will visit both as the mood hits, and you’ll enjoy both
differently.
What will undoubtedly have the biggest impact and
dominate the Hot App Summer though is Threads, from
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Even their functionality is culture-based and instead of a
Tweet or a Spout, there’s Tea and Brewing your Tea. And
the app allowed videos, memes, and gifs at launch,
recognizing that their user base creates and uses the
functionality more than any other users.
Like Spoutible, Spill had a limited launch, going with the
“Invitation only” route and only on IOS initially. The
exclusivity helped drive early demand as users searched
social media looking and asking for the elusive Invite
Codes. It was a necessary tactic as the Spill team ramps up
capacity and finishes testing, and they handled it in a way
that created demand and word of mouth even though they
could not initially meet the demand.
The media frenzy exceeded that of Spoutbile (and
Post/Mastodon) which was more methodical, but as or
even more effective for growth.
The public got to witness in real time two different
marketing strategies, each with varying degrees of success
and stumbles.
Threads was launched July 7th and within an hour there
were 5 million users. By the next morning there were 70
million as of day 3. And the march to a billion is on, which,
at its current rate they will hit by the end of the year, if not
sooner.
Threads had a built-in advantage though, since Mark
Zuckerberg also owns Meta/Facebook/Instagram, whose
combined user base is almost 4 BILLION — or half the
world’s population.
Seeing those numbers makes it easy to realize that
reaching a billion users is a done deal.
Zuckerberg hired workers Musk fired and already
humiliated. And many of the workers say they were
cheated out of severance. Twitter employees were also
asked (some say forced) to sleep on floors, clean their own
restrooms, and endure other degrading treatment by
Musk before being fired.
Zuckerberg and Musk have mutual dislike so there’s no
doubt Zuckerberg is enjoying the collapse of Twitter as
much as he’s enjoying the accelerated ramp up of Threads.
Though I have used Spoutbile since launch and have more
experience with it and I’ve only used Spill for a few days, I
believe there is room for both apps in the social media
landscape as their approaches are different, the user base
is generally different — though certainly there will be
crossover users as I am — and their growth strategies
different. Think of them like two very good restaurants
DEAR DEAN MAGAZINE | July 2023 | p.18