Hello Developers….Are you building for the Onavo mindset?

So I was wondering how Facebook identifies upcoming companies, startups , products and competition. How did FB decide to acquire Whatsapp? How does it see traction? What tell tale signs is it mining for? Beyond trends there has to be hard data and user attribution that is allowing it to completely destroy the competition or rather either acquire or copy them.

The secret weapon is Onavo. They came to FB via a 2013 Acquisition.

Onavo was founded in 2010 by Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger; it raised $13 million from Sequoia Capital and others. It provides mobile data usage analytics and helps companies see how their usage stacks up against other companies.

So the stated acquisition goal was to help bolster its internet.org initiative as the underlying sorcery Onavo was doing at the time was measuring and controlling data usage etc. Simplistically speaking, plus it gave FB its first office in the Holy Land, not that they couldn’t go to and build an office in Tel Aviv.

But the added value of the data apps that they built, was what was under its belly, the analytics biz, which gives app makers the ability to gauge how their apps fare on the open market, as well as giving more insight into how people actually use the apps after they’ve downloaded them.

Imagine, Facebook can use that download and user activity data to spot trends in apps that are up and coming, potentially spotting at a very early stage the types of apps that are gaining traction with the public and what the end intent of that app or service or network is.

FB is doing a great job at it, they are approaching potential threats faster, doing more acquisitions faster and also they are not shy any more of copying features once they identify them.

From a Corp Biz Dev standpoint that’s the nirvana of information dis partiy. Facebook’s corporate development team can then check out these companies and enter partnership deals early on in the game — or perhaps just outright buy and hold them .

So my fellow developers from Pakistan, what you need to be working on is stuff that scales and build traction, FB is apparently watching. So instead of focusing our time on Meme Forwarding, we need to figure out how we commercialize a 56m+ internet audience + active daily users to satiate FBs interest. Remember it doesn’t have to make money yet, it only has to have an audience and active user base at scale. They could care less if it makes money. So stop. Pause , calibrate and think. Perhaps you have an idea that by design you can make-work.

Today when I look at Onavos, new and improved app and check out their privacy policy, I can be certain that they are enjoying the oodles of data we are all providing them.

We do not share or sell your personally identifying information to third parties except if we have received your consent or given you notice, or in limited circumstances described in this Policy. For example, we may share personally identifying information with third parties and “Affiliates” (businesses that are or become legally part of the same group of companies that Onavo is part of, including but not limited to Facebook, Inc.) to operate, maintain and enhance the Services, or for other purposes as described below. 

Pretty freaky stuff if you are paranoid about privacy. But if you use FB today you already gave up most of those rights.

Some argue the market size is not large enough and FB really isn’t interested in Pakistan. On the contrary, FB at the moment has product teams working on analyzing the data and insights its getting from FB users from Pakistan as is evident from country specific items showing up within FB. Small subtle hints like Urdu text appearing in shared FB links, the FB OG tags them selves have new undertones supporting some product localization efforts.

Rest assured they are trying to figure out all kinds of sharing habits, they have enough meta data. I wouldn’t be surprised if they become the largest (original) news/information/content source in Pakistan in months and years to come given they have exacting level details on every target demographic and their sharing and consumption habits. Keep this in perspective, every time a marketer sets up a FB campaign for a client, FB has access to that data, they can almost in real time track the full lifecycle of that activity. Similarly the single biggest nugget of information FB has is access to political sentiment data. We will leave it at that, but the Trump campaign apparently relied on FB to Swing voter sentiment. So just saying, imagine the real power FB has with this data at play.

FB like Google has no office in PK perhaps they don’t need to. Their recent VP level engagement with the government shows that they are intrigued enough to come out to protect their interests. They just don’t know with the political climate at play, what side to join. Like Google they can get most of their stuff done remotely. Or hire third party contractors to provide local context to data without actually telling the poor data analysts what the end outcome of this data collection will yield. If they were smart(which they clearly are) they would be pairing psychometric and demographic info an adding a contextual layer to it to basically understand both market trends and growth opportunities. Given at their scale the total market growth opportunity for them in Pakistan is probably worth investigating but not action up on yet.

If they were to launch their marketplace feature in Pakistan, they would wipe clean every single Craigslist variant in the market, Kaymu etc folding in to their parent are fairly good examples of times to come. It would also completely clean house on the private seller groups on FB as there would be a natural tendency for people to move to the market place model, as you add secure payment on top of it, it would essentially clean up the mid market e-commerce folks also. Don’t know what FBs grand plans are in that space but clearly a lot of hustle is happening. Facebook is getting stingy about Pakistan based content producers accounts to be verified also, in its mind as the smaller guys who own large market views will become a big challenge if they are verified. Hence there is no clear policy on verification and based on market sentiment, private small publisher who have 10-20M Page views are constantly being denied the proverbial gold standard, albeit the blue verified status.

I am sure from mom and pop sellers to folks selling scorpions on FB are clearly trends worth exploring. The moral of the story is, there are many ways to stand out especially if you have a product, service or content play that can attract X-Million active users in Pakistan. The larger the scale and larger the active user demographic, with a compelling idea or product, you will be noticed by FB. Make sure you have a Delaware corporation that your are tied to, else the legal formalities of either investing in you or acquiring you will be a larger pipe dream than actually building a product that gets acquired. Lots of good things are happening in this space, keep your eyes out, build products that scale fast build market traction and will remain locally relevant. FB will come calling.

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