Today’s social media forces people to lie. Users take pretty-looking pictures with ideal backgrounds and optimistic underwritings even if their actual lives leave much to be desired. By breaking this unwritten rule you can only do harm.
But we also want some sincerity! At one point, this want gave birth to the concept of stories. ‘No need to show off here, it’ll be gone in one day, just be yourself here,’ Snapchat came up with it and others adopted this new feature with this specific reason in mind. But now people are making their stories look pretty too.
BeReal, the French startup of the day, gives humanity a new platform for sincere self-expression. The startup’s key idea is the suddenness of the photos. Once a day every user receives a push: ‘send a photo now,’ and the person has 2 minutes to photograph something. This timing won’t allow you to go to a studio, apply makeup, and naturally, BeReal doesn’t have filters. You have to be sincere. And you can’t send another post on the same day. The rest is pretty much the same as with others – friends and newsfeed. A relatively unique feature – the photos get taken from two cameras at once and then united into a collage, but that’s by far not the secret to a future rise or fall.
BeReal is already two years old, during this time it has boasted about three rounds of investments without ever announcing their amounts. In July, its app was the most frequently downloaded in the USA, 24 million people have downloaded it globally.
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
