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Learnings from Ankush Sachdeva from the time when Tiktok was banned in India 5 years ago: P.S He is the founder and CEO of Sharechat/Moj which is india's equivalent to tiktok and the biggest Social Media app built in India. "TikTok getting banned in the US!? Here are some lessons from when TikTok was banned in India 5 years ago:🧵 1. Incumbent social networks have the edge Not just because of traffic but because they already have feed recommendation engines deployed at scale. The hardest and slowest part of building a short video app is nailing the recommender system. 2. ByteDance cracked this early. They detailed it in their famous research paper "Monolith", showcasing how to train feed ranker models in real time. When we built this tech in 2021, it took us 2 years to put it in production. The result? +10 percentage points in D30 retention—more in one year than the previous 5 years combined! Today, this tech powers 200M+ MAUs on SC & Moj 3. Opportunities for new players The action doesn’t start when TikTok is removed from app stores. That only stops new downloads. The real action starts when TikTok stops serving the feed. Suddenly, 100M+ DAUs will have freed-up time and they'll divert it to other apps. 4. CAC will drop. Act fast. For the first few months, CAC will remain low. In India, ShareChat CAC dropped 5x in the first few months after TikTok's ban. For new entrants, this is a golden window to acquire users. 5. Unbundling could work TikTok wasn’t just about short videos. It supported diverse use cases: Short video consumption in specific niches, Livestreaming, live commerce These can be unbundled into focused apps—a potentially better strategy for new entrants."