Bitmoji $100M Missed Sale

Shaan tells a story about how his team built a better version of Bitmoji but shut it down without exploring acquisition opportunities.

"Before my first exit, I had built many companies and products. One app we made was basically way better than Bitmoji. We created an app where you could create a character of yourself, and then you could type any word - like hashtag 'boogie down' and it would make your character boogie down. You could type 'hashtag single ladies' and it would dress your character up like Beyonce doing the Single Ladies dance.

We got half a million people to download the app in the first month. They were pounding out tons of these stickers. It didn't have great longevity but had amazing novelty factor. We were trying to do it as its own messaging app which was too hard - people wanted WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

So we said 'well this isn't sticky as a messenger, it's not big enough where people will switch to text here. We don't want to build a sticker company, so let's just crumble it up and throw it away.' That was so dumb in retrospect. What we should have done is taken that little app to all the existing messaging companies and said 'Hey, this feature is unbelievable, building this is not easy, we've already built it, we've proven people really like it - just buy this and put it in your keyboard.'

Shortly after, Bitmoji sold for $100 million to Snapchat doing exactly that. I have no idea why our instinct was just to pivot versus take 30 days and have 5 conversations. Even if it doesn't go through, you owe it to yourself after 9 months of hard work to try."