Instagram launched a new messaging app! 🚨

“Asking folks to install another app is a short term painful thing, but if we wanted to focus on serving this [use case] well, we had to build a dedicated and focused experience.” – Mark Zuckerberg (2014)

Instagram just launched a dedicated messaging app. The experimental app is called Direct, and it's available today on Android and iOS.

The courageous decision to launch a standalone messaging app could go down in history as one of the all-time greats, right alongside Apple removing the headphone jack, Hype pivoting to HQ Trivia, and Tesla expanding into iPhone accessories.

Only time will tell if Instagram's messaging aspirations will work out as planed. In the short-term, the only true measure of success is if 3 months from now, Facebook tries to acquire them again.

Get Instagram Direct

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Buffer just published a new post highlighting 7 key insights for building a career in marketing, including tips from Helena Price, Alexis Ohanian, and Tim Ferriss.

“Figure out what you’re good at and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward.” – Naval Ravikant (Tip #6)

If your AI product has an onboarding step that says "tell us about your business" — your users are lying to you. Not maliciously. They just write whatever sounds good in the moment, skip half the fields, and click next.

Brandfetch's Brand Context API gives you structured brand data for 50M+ brands in a single call: voice,mission, positioning, audience, competitors, all of it. Pre-fill your onboarding before the user types a word.

Ground your AI features so they stop hallucinating about the brands your LLM barely knows. It's the scraping pipeline most teams never get around to building, already built. 100 free calls, no credit card.

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