Meerkat had 2M users in 3 days — then Twitter killed it by cutting off its social graph

Meerkat was a mobile live-streaming app developed by Life On Air, founded by Ben Rubin. The app launched in February 2015 and let users broadcast live video to their Twitter and Facebook followers. At SXSW Interactive in March 2015, Meerkat became the breakout hit of the festival, gaining 2 million users in its first three days. The app was the first to make live video accessible to anyone with a smartphone.

But Meerkat's growth was built entirely on Twitter's social graph — users found broadcasts through their Twitter followers. Weeks after launch, Twitter cut off Meerkat's access to its social graph API, crippling its core distribution mechanism. At the same time, Twitter announced it had acquired Periscope, a competing live-streaming app, for $120 million. Periscope launched on March 26, 2015, with full Twitter integration that Meerkat no longer had.

Meerkat pivoted to private group video and launched Houseparty, a group video chat app, in 2016. On October 4, 2016, Meerkat was shut down — withdrawn from the App Store and Google Play. The company had raised $12 million from Greylock Partners. Houseparty went on to be acquired by Epic Games in 2019 for about $50 million, but the original Meerkat product was a cautionary tale about building a business on someone else's platform.