Squad

» see squad.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

squad was an iphone and android app for sharing your screen with a small group of friends while video chatting at the same time. you opened the app, pulled in two or three people from your contacts, started a session, and could now show them whatever was on your phone screen, scrolling through instagram together or watching the same tiktok with all the reaction overlays visible while another person on the call narrated. the screen-sharing was the hook. all the other group-video products of the period were just camera-and-mic. squad added the actual surface that friends spend hours staring at on their own.

the company came out of esther crawford and ethan sutin's previous startup molly, which had been an app for letting people make faqs about themselves. molly never reached an audience and fizzled out. squad was the pivot that worked. the launch in january 2019 was covered by josh constine at techcrunch with the line that squad was the new screensharing chat app everyone will copy. funding followed quickly. y combinator and first round, with betaworks, put in a total of about $7.2 million. the user base that took to squad was very specific, mostly teen and twenty-something girls in the us doing exactly the second-screen-with-friends usage pattern the founders had bet on.

then the pandemic hit. squad's monthly usage spiked roughly eleven-fold in march and april of 2020 as americans locked down and discovered that video calls without something to look at together got boring fast. squad's whole premise turned out to be the missing piece in the houseparty and zoom and facetime stack. the press during that period framed squad as a possible breakout. crawford was on podcasts. the app started getting clones inside instagram and inside snapchat. it briefly looked like the team had timed it correctly.

twitter announced the acquihire on december 11, 2020. crawford joined as a product manager and sutin joined as a tech lead. the rest of the team moved over too. the squad app was shut down the next day, december 12. there was no transition path for users. the screenshare community that had grown up inside squad lost the product without warning. crawford later became one of the most visible faces of musk-era twitter and the executive in the photo with the sleeping bag in twitter hq during the takeover. she left twitter in early 2023. squad as a product never came back. screenshare-with-friends as a category sat unfilled for a stretch and then quietly migrated into discord's screen sharing and messenger's watch-together feature.

i was 36 in 2020 and the target demographic for squad was about fifteen years younger than me and located in a country where covid-19 lockdowns shaped the social-app market differently. squad never reached turkey at any scale i noticed. by the time i would have heard the name from anyone outside tech press it was already a closed-down product. it sits in the category of apps that did the right thing too small and got bought for the team rather than the audience.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is that the squad team had to ship a real engineering project to make this work. screen-sharing on mobile is a heavily restricted system api on both ios and android, and getting reliable broadcast of an active app's screen out to a group of remote viewers at acceptable latency required ios-specific replaykit hacks and a custom signaling stack. they did the work. they shipped a thing that felt like a fast lightweight version of a feature that the platform owners had explicitly made hard to build third-party. then twitter bought the team, shut the product, and reused exactly none of the screen-sharing tech publicly. the codebase did not show up inside any twitter or x feature anyone identified afterward. the engineering went into the drawer.

~ what really happened ~

the shutdown notice gave users about 24 hours to export anything they wanted, which for a screenshare app meant nothing concrete to export anyway. the announcement positioned the deal as a talent and product expertise injection for twitter, with the unstated subtext that twitter was trying to build out group-video and audio surfaces and needed people who had shipped that shape of product. spaces would launch publicly six months later and would absorb whatever organizational energy the squad team brought in. nothing recognizably descended from squad ever showed up on the user side of twitter or x. the founders did the four-year acquihire stint and moved on.

~ what got buried with it ~

squad is now mostly remembered as the entry-level case study in vc post-mortems about pandemic-era acquihires. the lesson the post-mortems tend to draw is that growing fast in a covid-shaped market window does not equal having a defensible product, since the same growth that made squad look like a breakout in april 2020 was already plateauing by autumn as people went back to in-person hanging out. twitter timed its offer for the moment the squad team had real social capital and real metrics. the team took the deal. the users who had built actual hangout habits inside squad were the ones who got told the next morning that the app was gone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »