no. 16: an app for every hobby.

on beli, strava, and bereal.

over the weekend, i saw the news recap by

Forerunner

ventures and it inspired me to talk about apps. apps, like the social ones. and anyone who knows me knows my affinity for niche consumer apps. while we have seen many apps rise and crash - bereal and lapse to name a few - others have stuck around.¹ at a high level, we have seen an insurgence in the popularity of so-called hobby apps. hobby-apps “built around activities such as running, reading or movie-going – are having a moment, and not just for love.” last year, i read an amazing piece by eugene wei and a piece by

Anu Atluru

that quite literally changed how i look at any app on my phone. i’m going to quickly summarize it:

StaaS - status as a service

wei states that people are status-seeking monkeys and people want to seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital. sounds harsh, i know. but, when you create an app, you essentially need to have the right balance of social capital attainment and utility. without this, your app is bound to fail. let’s apply this concept and look at some apps that i use and enjoy. these are also apps i have noticed my friends using in the last year that have become quite popular.

hobby-apps provide high social capital with relatively low utility.

i came for the fame, i stayed for the tool.

beli is a great example of a hobby-based app that has sustained its momentum over the last few years. you gain instant social capital by showing your friends and others where you eat out, what you ranked a restaurant versus your friends, and your ranking within the leadership board in the app. even though you probably joined because a friend made you, there is some utility, but it’s not very high, in using the app - it replaces your long list in your notes app of your favorite restaurants, its easy to export, and beli is building more and more utility into the app every day like last-minute reservation sharing. in the future, i can see giants like resy ready to build out the features that have made beli successful such as list generation, ranking, and last-minute reservation trading. resy has already started to build out lists within the resy app, but it’ll be much harder to accomplish due to the massive active user base of beli (me being one of them).

my top restaurants ranked on beli

another example of this is strava. while more niche of an app, the socialization of running has become all the rage these days. there are even run club meetups for single people, where runners wear black to indicate they are single.² as of 2023, strava had over 120 million registered users - a 118% increase from 2020. people can share how much they ran with their friends, discover routes, track their runs, and it’s become an app that most of my friends have these days. again, strava is similar to beli because of its clever use of social capital balanced with its utility.

why are hobby apps “in” right now?

“if you are a foodie, you are on beli. if you run, you are on strava.”

• we lack real community: apps like instagram and tiktok are inundated with content and lack actual community (notice how i didn’t mention snapchat, facebook, or x - i haven’t opened those apps in months). with hobby apps, you have the opportunity to bond with a friend you didn’t know also loved soothr as much as you did.

• we crave authenticity: in a quest for more organic, less curated content on our explore pages, hobby apps provide a great outlet and alternative resource for the discovery of content: “paradoxically, as major platforms such as twitter/x, youtube, tiktok and instagram push more algorithmically curated feeds, users may be less exposed to the content they want to see.”

• we want to be more “lowkey”: i have followers from when i was 13 years old on my instagram, and i don’t care to post my niche interests or the latest book i read on goodreads to my instagram account. we need a space where we can review the latest things in our lives and let it be sacred and breathe.

a last note: bereal died because it was useless.

the fall came as quickly as the rise.

while not necessarily a hobby app, i do want to talk about bereal. i argue this is why bereal died — it offered no real utility. downloads of the app spiked from 1.1 million in 2022 to ~53 million by the end of 2022. its growth was largely driven by gen z, making up almost 80% of users in some markets. while there are many reasons bereal died (i can go on about this), the ultimate reason to me was because there was no utility. it was only convenient in that you only had to post once a day at a certain time, but it quickly became a chore and bother for users. there is no real reason to open this app after the hype died down, when you had instagram stories to keep up with your friends. i never downloaded this app, but i am interested to hear from people who did and how they feel about it in the comments.

utility and social capital are only two axes to measure on, there are truly a plethora of reasons strava and beli are seeing high success and popularity right now. whether they can sustain the growth, or whether it’s all a hobby-app trend, will ultimately lay in whether they can provide enough long-term utility to stay relevant. as always, let me know what you think in the comments!

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📚 what i have been reading lately, linked here for you:

1. one of my favorite pieces on software and sociology: status as a service by eugene wei

2. a great recap by forerunner ventures

3. hobby apps have become the new social networks by the guardian

4. an article on the death of bereal

1. sorry to anyone who still uses bereal, i think you are a rarity. i think my brother still does so maybe he will chime in here.

2. this is happening in real life. check it out here.