‘Life Beyond Likes’: Isa Watson On Her Audio Social Platform Squad
Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.
On this episode of Office Hours, Founder and CEO Isa Watson shares the tragic, but inspirational story that led to the creation of her audio social platform, Squad, and the challenges she faces as a Black woman in tech.
“My journey to entrepreneurship was one that was very personal to me,” Watson said.
In 2013, Watson tragically lost her father in a bus accident while he and Watson’s mother were leading an annual trip for upcoming college students. She said it was the loneliest she’s ever felt in her life, but caused a powerful revelation.
“A realization that I had really over invested in my personal branding and my positioning to the world, and under invested in the relationships and friendships that brought me joy,” she said.
She created Squad, an audio communication platform, to ease her own feelings of loneliness and help others connect and build communities offline.
Squad has three core features: asynchronous messaging—back and forth, freestyle—a prompted question where your response is then sent to the rest of your squad, and squad line, which is a twist on traditional phone calls. Squads are limited to a maximum of 12 people to encourage the selectiveness Watson believes is so important to sustained friendships.
“It also just really forces the thought of, ‘Who do I want to talk to every day? Who is bringing me that joy?’” she said.
Watson said what sets Squad apart from other platforms is that each user’s ‘Squad’ is built around them specifically.
“And when you think about some of the things that people want—from a human perspective—when you're looking at a huge scale platform, like a Snapchat or a WhatsApp, you're trying to find your own place inside of it,” she explained. “As opposed to actually organically creating your own world. And from a world building perspective, everything in Squad is customized to you in a way that doesn't exist on these existing platforms.”
Squad’s evolution as an audio platform was one of trial, error and lots of research. Watson and her team originally experimented with text but found that deeper connections were difficult. They also experimented with video, but found it was too easy for users to disengage. Audio became the “happy medium.”
“The other thing was to give the intimacy of the conversation,” she said of her decision.
As opposed to other social communication apps, Squad users can only interact with content from people within their own Squad. And because the idea is to mimic real-life connections, all communication deletes within 24 hours.
“It's double opt-in around you,” she said. “The whole notion is how do we make these networks participatory."
Squad operates on three revenue models: 1) freemium, 2) in-app purchases (which she compares to Roblox) and 3) ad model. As the platform has grown, Watson and her team have expanded their market strategies to include in-app driven growth and outside of the app driven growth.
“So on the outside of the app, we partnered with companies that gave away free food if you had a Squad line call, or things like that,” she explained. “On the flip side, we have a very big high school demographic. We've actually created a high school ambassador program within New York City.”
But as a young woman, and a young Black woman especially, Watson said raising funds was challenging at first.
“[Investors] couldn’t see me being shoulder to shoulder with a 'Jack' or an 'Evan,' and I just thought that was very interesting and very telling,” she said. “I absorbed that energy and it manifested as an insecurity. I felt insecure because I felt like I was perceived as a much riskier founder because I was Black.”
Through Squad’s prime target demographic—late teens—she’s learned to turn those insecurities into strengths.
“The reality is that when I talk to the users and I'm with these high school kids in Brooklyn who are white, Asian, Black, Indian…they actually love and appreciate the fact that I'm a Black woman,” she said.
Hearing the feedback from the younger generation of users helps Watson feel validated in the importance of her work. She believes Squad is positioned to be more than just an alternative social platform, as more and more people crave authenticity.
“People are yearning for that authentic experience,” Watson said, “The data shows, and I don’t have to opine on it, that social media has been very detrimental to our young girls and to people in general, and created this echo chamber of perfectionism.”
dot.LA Reporter Decerry Donato contributed to this post.
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Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.
