How Faves Is Building the Future of Content Curation
By: Zachery Lim
Tags: Founder Stories, Startup, Founders, Xoogler, Social Media

How Faves Is Building the Future of Content Curation

Tyler Maloney

We consume content across different apps. Is messaging really the best place to share posts with the people we know and love?

After messaging, link sharing is the most common user behavior in the world. Yet, amazingly, it has no dedicated platform. Most of us share links through messaging apps — but the experience just isn’t right. Articles start to feel like obligations as texting has become the new email.

Faves is a new app where friends connect over content. Users (or curators as they’re called) post their favorite content to Faves and follow each other to see what their friends like. The app has a Tiktok-like interface with one piece of content per screen. Faves has also leaned into social audio. Users can reply to posts with 20 seconds of audio and even add popular soundbites from TV Shows like The Office and Schitt’s Creek.

Early adopters include Marissa Mayer, VCs at Sequoia/a16z/Lightspeed and Heads of Product at TikTok, Robinhood, Google and Facebook. The company has retention metrics on par with early Snapchat and a waitlist nearing 17,000.

Now Hiring: Faves just closed a $4M seed (unannounced) and is hiring a Head of Growth, ML Engineer, Analytics Lead and Fullstack Engineer.

Early Access: Faves is letting Xooglers jump their 17,000 person waitlist by signing up here.

The Insight

When the world entered lockdown Tyler Maloney — like the rest of us — got on TikTok.

He was amazed to see that the most popular videos had upwards of 50,000 shares, despite the fact that TikTok had no on-platform sharing features. That meant that 50,000 people were sending the video off platform through messaging apps.

But messaging apps aren’t built for sharing links. None of the content plays in-app, there’s no algorithm to help you determine what’s worth your time, and links interrupt the flow of conversation. As a consumer, he noticed that he’d started leaving messages unread as a reminder to go back and read the links. He was treating messaging like email.

Faves

Faves

Faves is a platform for curation where people can connect with each other over content. Users share their favorite tweets, memes, articles, videos and podcasts and find all the best content on a subject in just one place. Faves provides a place for users to learn what content is influencing the decisions of people they respect and laugh at what their friends find funny. Want to land a job in venture capital? You can learn about the favorite podcasts of investors at Sequoia. Want to explore product management? You can find the articles that TikTok’s Head of Product finds insightful. Want to see what your friends find funny across different platforms? You can find it on Faves.

Growing Faves from a Cold Start

One of the biggest challenges of launching Faves was addressing the cold-start problem for social media platforms.

“It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. There’s no content because there are no viewers, and there are no viewers because there is no content. Our solution was to recruit a bunch of people who care about what they are consuming. We found the thought leaders of Silicon Valley such as the Heads of Product at TikTok, Robinhood, and Facebook to build the initial audience centered around their content. We learned people care about content recommendations from two groups of people: those they admire and their friends. So we are building Faves to cater towards both of those groups.”

Hustling for Curators

One of the thought leaders that Tyler spoke with was Deb Liu, who is the CEO at Ancestry, Founder of Facebook Marketplace, and Founder of Women in Product. Deb was intrigued by Faves, but there was one problem: Faves is currently only on iOS and Deb uses an Android.

“When I learned this, I realized this was such a big missed opportunity. So I asked her where she lives and asked if I could get her an iPhone. That same day, I went to the Apple Store, bought her an iPhone, and delivered it to her. Today, she is one of our leading content curators and she has helped us bring on a bunch of really great people. Cold starts are very challenging so we hustled and luckily ran into Deb. By joining, she helped change the trajectory of our growth.”

Launching Invite-Only

In April 2021, Faves launched as an invite-only product to learn about its users and improve the experience as it scales up. They handpicked the first 100 curators and began opening the app to 20–50 users a day. Based on user feedback and analytics, Faves has been tweaking the experience and shipping updates about every two days. A month later, there are about 17,000 people on the waitlist.

“We’ll continue to open it up little by little. If a product works it grows on its own. We want to continue iterating and make the experience so good that users invite all of their friends.”

Providing a Low Barrier to Curate

Faves allows users to share content from different platforms, which creates an interesting dynamic of mixed media. They enable curators to provide a brief commentary on the content and allow the audience to dig deeper if they would like. As a result, Faves has seen a lot of activity.

“People have been posting frequently. We believe one reason the activity is so high is because the barrier to curate is so low. Getting in front of a camera and making a TikTok video can be intimidating. But curation is easy.”

Making Content Sharing Exciting

In the future, Tyler believes Faves will become the go-to place for people to share content.

“I think it is going to be a ubiquitous app where people find and share content. People can see what a product leader they want to be like is recommending. And they can also see funny videos their friends are laughing at.

Content sharing through text is a bad experience when it shares the same place as people contacting you for instant responses. If we can create a platform that makes content sharing exciting, then Faves will be a special platform.”

Growing the Team

Today, Faves is focused on continuing to improve the product, getting people on the platform, raising their seed round, and hiring.

Faves is hiring for the various roles:

A Head of Growth

Engineers with a focus on recommendation engines

Data science

Data engineering

Full stack engineer

More About Tyler

Tyler founded Undercover Colors in 2014 as a senior in college, which creates products that allow people to easily test their drink for signs of drug tampering. In 2018, he left to pursue an MBA from Stanford where he was a Campus Investment Partner at The MBA Fund. After graduating from Stanford, he founded Faves.