The ‘Filipino product-market fit’: Why social apps go viral in the Philippines

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Nikita Bier is a Silicon Valley founder whose social apps have been acquired by Discord and Facebook. He also claims to have coined a term: the Filipino product-market fit.

It means exactly how it sounds.

“Every year, a product manager would observe their new product getting intense adoption in the Philippines and proclaim their idea was working,” Bier wrote on his X account yesterday, referring to his time working at Meta. “Directors would quickly staff the team and alert their VPs of the newfound discovery – only to find out that the pattern was not reproducible in other countries.”

He went on to note that the country has one of the world’s highest time spent online. This is backed by data: according to research from Datareportal, Filipinos aged 16 to 64 spent eight hours and 52 minutes per day on the internet in 2023 – the third longest globally, after South Africa and Brazil.

“They will try literally anything for a few days,” Bier added.

At the time of writing, the tweet has garnered over 1 million views. Replies range from more earnest responses, references to a longtime shadow industry, to a roast.

But there are users from other tech companies who echoed Bier’s thinking, such as a former engineer at Tumblr as well as people from multiple startups – including one user touting Axie Infinity. The play-to-earn game, wrote the user, “basically got the flywheel going relying for like 90% on the Philippines in the early days.”

That’s not new information. Sky Mavis, the game’s Vietnam-based developer, said in a 2022 article that as much as 35% of traffic to Axie Infinity – and its biggest share of its 2.5 million daily active users – comes from the Philippines.

Irene Umar, co-founder of YGG SEA, told Tech in Asia at the time that the game’s rapid adoption rate among Filipinos is “because they can speak English.”

Still, despite becoming a popular earnings vehicle for many Filipinos in its early days, things have quieted down for Axie Infinity. And some users replying to Bier noted that several other countries – namely Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – make for better test beds.

Another suggested market also happens to be an important one for a certain Southeast Asian tech giant. “Brazil was the total opposite. It’s the place that everyone wants to do well in, but struggles,” tweeted an Nvidia engineer who used to work at Spotify and Tumblr.

In other words, “the Brazil product-market fit is real product-market fit,” another user wrote.

See also: This Philippines-based VC eyes $25m SEA fund to target startups with ‘can do’ spirit