What You Could Learn from @John About Teens and Social Media

When most people think of John Shahidi two words come to mind. Bieber & Mayweather. Yes, that Bieber (67 million Twitter followers, 73 million on FB) & that Mayweather (6.4 million Twitter followers, 12 million on FB). The reason being — John Shahidi counts both as investors and friends.

So.

You’re probably thinking, “slick talking, super confident, tall, extroverted, arrogant, LA kinda dude.” You’d be dead wrong. As I’ve gotten to know John Shahidi he has broken every stereotype that one may have of somebody who spends the day driving around in an SUV with Justin and landing famous investors. And I’ve learned a lot of things in the process.

Shahidi’s inspiration for building Shots was that he was picked on growing up. He knew first hand what it was like for people to bully or make you feel self conscious due to your weight or looks or physical abilities. So when he built shots it was with the goal of protecting younger people from this sort of intimidation. It was sort of an anti Secret or YikYak that become bullying platforms due to their anonymity and cruel crowd-enraged mob behavior.

I first learned about Shahidi’s perspective from my friend Shahed Khan who was working as an analyst at Upfront and told me Shots was much more unique than I had perceived because at first glance it appeared to me to be just another version of Instagram. But with > 5 million monthly actives (50% logging in daily) and amazingly 75% women and with an average age of 16 year’s old I knew I had to learn more.

So I sat down with John (whose Twitter account is, well, @john) and learned his story.

He explained to me that especially for young girls social media apps are really intimidating because increasingly teens are judged by the number of followers they have or by the number of people who like their photos on Instagram. So shots did away with both of those conventions. You can have followers and you can see who your followers are but Shots doesn’t publish this to anybody. You can share photos and people can “like” them but Shots doesn’t publish the number of likes.

What John explained is that while on some level this meant his growth curve was slower initially (because there was less of a need or drive to try and invite all your “friends” and collect them as a badge of honor) young people felt more comfortable sharing their true selves. And importantly, just like on Tumblr no comments were allowed.

To a 47-year-old, married, self confident guy who thinks about how to build virality into products this seemed like heresy. But if you think about it young kids (girls especially) are being made to feel inadequate about their like sizes or follower sizes so it drives them to extreme sharing behaviors that become less safe and it also drives them to feel judged, ashamed and worthless. So he did away with it. And of course comments are used to call people fat or ugly or stupid. So no comments = no judgement.

If you want to understand the cesspool that it Internet comments you only need to look at this picture and if you have a heart take two minutes to watch this movie trailer a “A Brave Heart” from a truly inspirational woman who decided to fight back against online bullying (including people actually telling her to kill herself).

And reading this should give you a clue what John Shahidi and Shots is about.

What I found in meeting @John is a quiet, thoughtful, introverted, charming guy who doesn’t enjoy the public taunting that he occasionally receives for having a company backed by such high profile names. I sat down with John and filmed for my show — BothSidesTV — and discussed the nature of social media, of working with kids and of landing celebrities as users or investors in your company.

Here’s a two-minute clip of John answering the question about celebrities.

His advice is simply and earnest, “It’s simple. Just make something cool. Make it great. Especially these days celebrities and influencers are so interested in tech.” And he should know. He landed Justin Bieber because Shahidi and his brother Sam had started a games company and Bieber actually wanted to meet them because he loved their game. He goes on to talk about his celebrity friends and how “everybody celebrity is using DubSmash” and from what he understands they’ve done zero outreach. Same with the Shyp app. “My friend King Bach (13.7 million Vine followers) borrowed an Xbox from his friend and Shyp’d it back.”

And if you watched the quick clip of John or just got a sense of his personality from my writing you’ll see why I decided to invest in his company. Shahidi is a guy you just want to root to win. He’s humble, earnest, caring and likable. And he has the right motives for what he’s trying to accomplish. He’s the anti-poser, anti-hanger-on, which is why I’m sure celebrities actually like and trust him.

If you have some time I think you’ll really enjoy learning from John. As I did. Here is the full interview. Enjoy