Would you be surprised to learn that one of Gen Z’s most popular social media apps was founded in France and based in Paris? Facebook/Instagram came out of Silicon Valley, and Snapchat is also based in California, but one of the top social media apps today was created by a 25-year-old French mountain biking guru who worked for GoPro and used his expertise in tech visuals to a create a chart-topping app drop.
It’s BeReal, and it was founded in 2019, becoming publicly available in early 2020. It was insanely popular by 2022, spreading over college campuses through a paid ambassador program and then trickling down to the masses of Gen Z smartphone owners. It finished 2022 as the iPhone App of the Year. The app sends a notification to all its users every day simultaneously, although the time is unpredictable, and users have 2 minutes to take a picture to upload to their network of friends. The app format has become increasingly clogged with extra features, celebrity and brand accounts, and ads, but the product idea was brilliant and saw widespread success. The creation and diffusion of the app seemed to follow the 1/1 rule that YouTube experienced: 1 year to develop the product and 1 for it to be adopted by the general public.
As the app began to gain momentum 18 months after it was founded, Accel led a $30 million round in the company, and growth spiked soon after. However, since this event, Alexis Barreyat and BeReal’s cofounder (Kevin Perreau, a chief project officer) have declined all media requests. Little is known about either of them, and nothing has been said about the details of BeReal’s creation. The app was acquired by Voodoo for about $537 million USD, and no reporter has been able to reach Barreyat since. He maintains a private Instagram account with a faceless profile photo of him on a dirt bike and less than 3,000 followers, which is amusingly unusual for a young entrepreneur with a nine-figure net worth. Currently BeReal is valued at about $630 million and shows no indication of going public soon.
Barreyat’s elusivity is an interesting example of how different entrepreneurs handle the possibility of fame when a product like a social media app goes viral and begins to make big money. It’s very possible that Barreyat saw the pressure and eyes on globally-known entrepreneurs especially in the tech space, and decided to do everything possible to avoid that. His LinkedIn profile doesn’t even have a headshot. It also demonstrates that it’s possible to design an innovative product and operate the business over it without needing a mile-wide digital footprint. Although entrepreneurial opportunities exist today for people who want to feature and promote themselves extensively on the internet, with an innovative enough idea, opportunities are also abundant for those who aren’t willing to.
This is awesome. If I ever achieve success on this level, I hope I can maintain the low profile of Barreyat. It proves that one can be at least publicly humble in our highly connected global community of social media entrepreneurs. And biking is really fun, it’s interesting to see his advancement from working for a cool company to launching such a popular app of his own.