The key to Sora's social app wasn't just generating beautiful videos, but allowing users to inject themselves and friends via "cameos." This non-obvious feature transformed the experience from a tech demo into a human-centric social platform, achieving immediate internal product-market fit.
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A powerful innovation technique is "humanization": benchmarking your product against the ideal human experience, not a competitor's feature set. This raises the bar for excellence and surfaces opportunities for deep delight, like Google Meet's hand-raise feature mimicking in-person meetings.
The obvious social play for OpenAI is to embed collaborative features within ChatGPT, leveraging its utility. Instead, the company launched Sora, a separate entertainment app. This focus on niche content creation over core product utility is a questionable strategy for building a lasting social network.
The 'uncanny valley' is where near-realistic digital humans feel unsettling. The founder believes once AI video avatars become indistinguishable from reality, they will break through this barrier. This shift will transform them from utilitarian tools into engaging content, expanding the total addressable market by orders of magnitude.
Synthesia initially targeted Hollywood with AI dubbing—a "vitamin" for experts. They found a much larger, "house-on-fire" problem by building a platform for the billions of people who couldn't create video at all, democratizing the medium instead of just improving it for existing professionals.
AI video tools like Sora optimize for high production value, but popular internet content often succeeds due to its message and authenticity, not its polish. The assumption that better visuals create better engagement is a risky product bet, as it iterates on an axis that users may not value.
The long-term vision for the Sora app extends beyond entertainment. The "Cameo" feature is the first, low-bandwidth step toward creating detailed user profiles. The goal is an "alternate reality" where digital clones can interact, perform knowledge work, and run simulations.
Proficiency with AI video generators is a strategic business advantage, not just a content skill. Like early mastery of YouTube or Instagram, it creates a defensible distribution channel by allowing individuals and startups to own audience attention, which is an unfair advantage in the market.
Learning from Instagram's evolution towards passive consumption, the Sora team intentionally designs its social feed to inspire creation, not just scrolling. This fundamentally changes the platform's incentives and is proving successful, with high rates of daily active creation and posting.
Instead of comparing to competitors, compare your product to the ideal human interaction. Google Meet aimed to be like a real conversation, not just better than Zoom. This 'humanization' framework pushes teams to think beyond features and focus on a more intuitive, emotionally resonant experience.
Hera's founders initially built a full video editor but found users were only excited by the motion graphics feature. They pivoted to focus exclusively on that, built a prototype in two days, and were accepted into YC a week later, validating the importance of following user excitement over a preconceived vision.
