The Asynchronous Scaffolding Test

Core principles

• 01Topline surge masks broken retention. A new market blowing up every month or two hides the fact that nobody comes back.
• 02A generalised synchronous product is not durable on its own — people don't broadcast live many times a day.
• 03Retention needs a reason to open the app when you are not broadcasting: an async way to stay in touch with the community.
• 04Vertical live products (Twitch for gaming, Whatnot for selling) have different properties and can be durable standalone — the anchor comes from the vertical.
• 05Watch what people actually do with the product, not the vision you told yourselves it was for.
• 06Speed of integration with your distribution partner is itself a durability factor.

How to run it

1. 1

   Separate surge from retention

   Instrument cohort retention independently of topline growth. Periscope blew up in the US, then France, then Turkey, then the Middle East — each surge masked the fact that the core product's retention was poor.

   Watch out If your growth story is a sequence of market explosions, you may have no product-market fit at all, only a fit with novelty.

2. 2

   Ask the between-sessions question

   What does a user do in your product when they are not doing the synchronous thing? Beykpour's framing: how often throughout the day would you broadcast live from your phone? If the answer is 'rarely', the product is empty most of the time.

   Pro tip Say the loop out loud: broadcast → nothing → broadcast. Anything in that gap is your retention engine.

3. 3

   Check what users are actually doing versus your vision

   Periscope's story was teleportation — see through someone else's eyes, rear-facing camera on the world. In reality most users were bored or lonely and simply wanted to talk to other people. That gap was the real product signal, and they missed it for years.

   Pro tip The gap between the told story and the observed behaviour is where the next product lives — it's what became Spaces.

4. 4

   Choose: scaffold or verticalise

   Either surround the synchronous mechanic with async features that let a community stay in touch (the Instagram and TikTok model — async product, synchronous feature), or narrow into a vertical whose native gravity carries retention (Twitch, Whatnot).

   Watch out The one position with no path is generalised, synchronous, standalone. That was Periscope.

5. 5

   Fix retention before you spend on distribution

   Periscope prioritised other things over retention and even shipped changes that made retention worse, while the Twitter integration that was central to the acquisition thesis took far too long. Then Facebook put ~300 people on copying live and bought out the top creators.

   Pro tip A distribution partner distracted by its own roadmap ('refining the core') will not save you — assume you are on your own clock.

In the wild

Common mistakes

Is it for you?

From the transcript