Josh Elman interviews Alex Zhu

·2 min read
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Alex Zhu, cofounder of Musical.ly (later acquired and merged into TikTok), initially pursued an education-focused startup. He envisioned combining Twitter's social features with Coursera's educational model to enable mobile sharing of educational content.

It failed.

The pivot to Musical.ly came from recognizing what people actually want versus what sounds good in a pitch deck.

Five Major Lessons

1. Content Must Be Lightweight

"The content creation AND consumption need to happen within seconds, not minutes or hours."

For social platforms to succeed, friction in creating and consuming content must be minimized. If it takes too long to make or watch, it won't work.

2. Entertainment Trumps Education

Education runs counter to typical user behavior. Rather than fighting human nature, the founders pivoted toward entertainment. People use phones primarily for communication and entertainment - work with that, not against it.

This is the hard lesson: your noble vision for educating the world might be less valuable than helping people have fun.

3. Target Young Adopters

Teens represent ideal early users because they possess:

  • Abundant free time
  • Creative instincts
  • Digital familiarity
  • Built-in distribution through schools

Success with this demographic generates organic word-of-mouth marketing at minimal cost.

4. Prioritize Utility First

"First Instagram users didn't use app for the feed, likes or comments. They came for utility - amazing filters."

Build single-player functionality before developing multiplayer community features. The utility has to work even if you're the only user.

5. Practice Participatory Design

Maintain close user involvement throughout development. The Musical.ly team engaged hundreds of early users via WeChat, conducting daily conversations to understand not just product usage but cultural context and user thinking.

This isn't user research. This is obsessive user immersion.

The striking thing about these lessons is how obvious they seem in retrospect and how easy they are to ignore when building. Education sounds impressive. Entertainment sounds frivolous.

But entertainment works. Build for what people want, not what you think they should want.