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An early TikTok exec just launched a dating app, Spark



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A former president at musical.ly (now known as TikTok), Alex Hofmann has already done something that seems impossible: he helped build an app that could compete with social giants like Meta, YouTube or Snapchat. After ByteDance acquired musical.ly for around $1 billion in 2018, Hofmann left the company to become an investor, but he soon decided he wanted to make apps again. So, Hofmann founded 9count, the parent company to apps like Everland, Helpline, Juju and the friendship-making app Wink, which has millions of users.
“There’s a trend that I observed in China that a lot of tech companies there don’t just build one product, but multiple products,” Hofmann told TechCrunch. He noted that a company like Meta grows by acquiring apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, while Twitter continues iterating on the same flagship app. “Having one product is is super exciting, of course, but we do see the trend that there are more and more different interest groups. Serving them with just one product can work, but there is a higher c …

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