Suchit Dash on Dubsmash, Retention and the Decision to Sell

Suchit Dash began in product management at PayPal, working on the checkout button used by merchants. He says product appealed to him because it combines decisions, leadership without direct authority and the work of turning ideas into shipped products. He encourages early-career people to experience both established companies and startups.

Dash and his wife moved from San Francisco to Berlin for personal reasons, intending to take a year away from work. After a few months he began reaching out to local companies with concrete ideas and work, including SoundCloud. That led him to the early Dubsmash team, which had already started the product.

Understanding users begins with observing behaviour and asking what motivates it, Dash says. In creator products he describes three needs—community, recognition and income—and argues that tools should support the underlying ambition, not just make creation technically easier. Stebbings notes that he had underestimated the value of creator tools in some investment decisions.

With little early data, Dash used intuition and observation, then tested the hypothesis through usage. He says good products reach a home screen, but great ones enter a person’s thoughts even when not in use. For Dubsmash, people began hearing a quotation and imagining how to use it in a video.

The first Dubsmash let users lip-sync to an audio clip and send the video to friends. Dash believes substituting a familiar voice reduced the awkwardness of hearing one’s own voice, while a playful performance helped people make friends laugh. Those are his interpretations of user motivation.

The interview title describes 43 million users in ten days, while Stebbings says ten million users in 43 days in the conversation. The captions do not reconcile the two figures or establish their definitions. Dash credits rapid organic sharing partly to constraints: unable to afford video hosting, the team let users send watermarked clips through existing messaging apps.

Despite virality, Dash says the initial creation-only product did not have durable product-market fit. Roughly five out of 100 users remained after 30 days, according to his account. The app had no internal social network or way to watch the best videos, and he compares the early use case to a party trick rather than a daily habit.

Celebrity use and sudden international downloads were exciting, but the team knew its retention was weak. It tracked 30- and 90-day retention and tried adding messaging and an address-book graph. Dash says that iteration failed to create a daily use case and had to compete with networks people had already built elsewhere.

Dash attributes the problem to not sufficiently understanding or motivating people to return every day. He says the team tried to avoid believing its own hype during good periods and remained candid about weak retention. Sustaining morale became increasingly difficult as competitors grew and the business kept searching for a repeatable use case.

After raising a Series B, Dubsmash reduced its Berlin team from about 40 people to roughly four and moved to New York to start again. Dash describes the empty office as painful. He says the board supported cutting costs and extending runway so the company could keep experimenting, while the founders relied on optimism and persistence.

To decide whether to persist, Dash looks for early signals in what users actually do, especially behaviour the team did not anticipate. While browsing Instagram, he saw a young Black teenager use Dubsmash to dance rather than lip-sync. Following that example led the team to a small community with unusually strong retention.

The users uploaded their own sounds, created dance challenges and shared videos on Instagram under hashtags so others could participate. Dash says the activity began with a small group in Atlanta. Dubsmash rebuilt around it, allowing accounts, audio uploads and posting within the product, while shutting down some markets including India.

Dash reports that the new version retained roughly 30–35 out of 100 users at day 30, compared with about five for the original, and about 20% after around 12 months. He does not provide the cohort definitions or an independent audit. He also describes a “smile” in overall usage: after a decline from the viral peak, activity began growing again.

Within the dance community, Dash saw creators seeking audiences and money at different scales. He recalls accounts offering promotions for payments, including a larger account charging about $50 and a small account asking $5. He interpreted this as evidence that aspiring creators wanted recognition and earning opportunities.

Stebbings asks whether every social platform needs its own creator stars. Dash says Dubsmash did develop native creators, but worried that concentrating attention on the largest accounts could discourage newcomers. The team avoided prominent leaderboards and tried to make discovery feel more accessible.

Dash argues that social products should think carefully about the structure of connections. Early networks often centred on friends and address books; he sees TikTok as organising around interests. He suggests that location or conversations can also organise communities, and praises aggregated place reviews and Reddit discussions as examples. He is a Reddit executive and has a commercial interest in its success.

Asked about Threads, Dash praises its initial distribution but declines to predict a precise outcome. He expects the team to keep iterating and says it may find audiences that value it, without claiming it will necessarily reach billions. This is his assessment at the time of the 2023 interview.

Dubsmash then faced a competitor with spending on a scale it had not seen. Dash says the company had about $7 million in cash after a raise, while TikTok was spending at a comparable scale in roughly a week. These are his estimates and comparisons, not audited advertising figures.

Dash says TikTok used granular ad targeting on platforms such as Facebook and Snap, acquired Musical.ly and brought creators across with financial incentives. He believes later changes to targeting would make the same approach harder, though substantial spending might still matter. His account is a former competitor’s assessment, not independent evidence of every campaign or payment.

An escalating creator-fund race left Dubsmash with a choice: raise substantially more money to compete or find a partner. Dash says the co-founders decided in January 2020 to pursue a sale. He advises founders to be clear about that decision because an acquisition process can consume time and attention.

Unlike fundraising, he says, selling requires alignment with an acquirer on values and day-to-day working culture as well as price. Founders must understand that a sale involves giving up control, and that many companies may have only one credible offer. This is his experience, not a rule that sellers must accept any terms.

Stebbings says he would not tell the wider team during a sale process; Dash agrees, arguing that uncertain negotiations create an emotional roller coaster. He says even his updates to co-founders were sometimes moderated. Their views describe one approach to confidentiality and do not resolve the obligations or needs of every team.

Dash says two or three earlier acquisition processes failed before Reddit. He learned that product leaders or CEOs often matter more than corporate-development contacts, and that a term sheet or letter of intent is not a completed deal. Diligence brings more stakeholders, internal alternatives and opportunities for a transaction to fail.

The founders told investors that competing could require raising and spending $100 million without certainty of success, while Instagram, YouTube, Snap and others were entering the space. Dash says the board had heard candid updates throughout the journey. The $100 million was the team’s scenario, not a reported amount raised or spent.

Dash says the founders preferred a partnership over a TikTok copy and saw value in interest-based communities. He believes Reddit’s pseudonymous discussions create a different kind of connection from a friend graph. His favourable comparison is informed by his role as a Reddit executive.

In hindsight, he wishes Dubsmash had found Reddit sooner, after several painful negotiations. He says the Dubsmash team moved to Reddit and describes the outcome positively. The account reflects his experience of the acquisition and subsequent employer, not an independent assessment of every employee’s experience.

Dash names focus on product-market fit, intellectual honesty and stamina as the mindsets that kept Dubsmash going. The team reduced payroll and office costs, and did not mistake publicity for retention. He recalls a data breach with about ten weeks of cash left and says insurance and a breakup fee in a separate process helped the company continue.

After acquisition, he says the executive mindset changed: collaboration and alignment across teams mattered more than issuing an entrepreneurial directive. Communication also had to remain consistent as words travelled through a larger organisation. He describes these as lessons from moving between the two environments.

Dash recounts a journalist learning that possible buyers were interested. After initially denying the story, he called back and suggested others might also be pursuing it; an article followed, and he says Reddit then contacted the company. This is his account of how that contact arose.

On video monetisation, he agrees that a feed can show fewer ads in video than in text. At Reddit he sees conversation as the central value: people find information, entertainment and communities through discussions. He wants new formats to surface those conversations more effectively, a product vision tied to his current role.

His proudest Dubsmash decision was committing to dance challenges before cash ran out. At Reddit, he says an early video release drew strong criticism, so the team acknowledged it and created a community for reporting problems. He reports that users helped find bugs and that usage improved, without supplying independent metrics.

His quick-fire advice is to listen to what users love, observe what they do and acknowledge problems they raise. He praises an investor who supported Dubsmash through difficult periods and cites books on execution, negotiation and imitation. He also praises United Airlines’ mobile features, based partly on his own experience recovering a lost bag.