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Zenly Playbook

Zenly, a popular Gen-Z location-sharing social app, shut down two days ago. So how did this French hidden champion flourish and vanish? And what can we learn from it?

Playbook​

Unparalleled technology. The market has dozens of location-tracking apps that are either battery hoarders or inaccurate at best (not real-time or not precise.) Zenly shows surprising accuracy and battery efficiency from a 3-year research project for a child safety app before founding Zenly. Even from the early days, Zenly hired Ph.D.-level researchers to acquire unparalleled tech talents. Server and Front-end engineers were mainly seniors, forming a small elite team.

Targeting the right group. Zenly targeted Gen-Z's, finding that when a quarter of a school uses Zenly, it takes less than a week to saturate the entire school. Zenly focused on sub-group-led growths; for example, Japanese students studying abroad at Taiwanese University eventually spread Zenly to the whole island. One interesting note was that teenagers surprisingly did not care about privacy; the CEO regretted that privacy concerns in the early days were a waste of time—the market always outmove makers.

Branding. Location tracking is creepy, so they aimed the Best Friend Forever or In Real Life Friend vibe: pop interface, Gen-Z copywriting, cute colors, and smiley emoji everywhere. When asking for the actual location, it emphasized spending good times with your friends rather than the location tracking itself.

** Acquiring talents**. Zenly had not only exceptional engineers but also outstanding designers and operators. 10x people don't join a startup upfront, so Zenly made them involved in the company by hiring them as a freelancer and then onboarded them to the team.

Zenly, now part of history​

From the Stay Home challenge in 2020 to a mass-scale 3D map update in 2022, Zenly prepared for its upcoming future. However, the recent layoff at Snap wiped out the Zenly team alongside the Snap Mini App team. I do think this is Snap's mistake. Even my university peers do not use Snap anymore but still use Zenly. It almost feels like Facebook is killing Instagram for Facebook. I hope Zenly's revolutionary DNA gets well-integrated into Snap, seeking revival.

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젠리의 성공 공식

Zenly Playbook

Zenly

... and shut down in 2023. Zenly Playbook 젠리의 성공 공식

30-Day Tweet Test (Harry Stebbings)

| 02-03 | 🇬🇧 Zenly Playbook <br/> 🇰🇷 젠리의 성공 공식 ...

2023-02-03

- Zenly Playbook