Solving the Empty Feed: BeReal Explore & The Power of Finite Discovery

The empty feed is BeReal's biggest growth bottleneck

BeReal's core strength - authentic, friend-based content - is also its biggest growth bottleneck. When friends are inactive, users open the app to an empty feed and bounce almost immediately. There's no algorithmic backstop, no fallback content, and no reason to stay.

Together, the numbers validate a specific thesis: users want discovery, but only with strict guardrails around it.

Reframing the problem: from the pressure to post, to the reason to stay

I started by mapping the full BeReal user journey, and my initial Problem Statement & Opportunity Note focused on the Daily Posting Experience: the anxiety users feel when BeReal's daily notification arrives at an inconvenient time, and the pressure to post something before the moment passes. That felt like the obvious friction point - it's the most visible, most talked-about part of using BeReal.

But when I looked closer at the Connect phase of the journey, a bigger threat surfaced: if friends don't post, users have no reason to stay, no matter how comfortable posting itself has become. That's a direct hit to Daily and Monthly Active Users, not just an occasional annoyance. I pivoted my focus from content creation friction to content consumption friction - from the moment of posting, to the much larger problem of what happens when there's nothing to see at all.

The Bounce Cycle

Without an algorithmic fallback, a quiet friend group turns every session into the same three steps:

↺ repeats every session until a friend finally posts

To understand how competitors solve this, I benchmarked BeReal against TikTok's public app-store review sentiment across six shared themes. TikTok dominates discovery - its For You Page gives users somewhere to go even when their social graph is quiet - and continuous consumption. BeReal dominates close-friend connection and authenticity, the exact quality TikTok users say they wish their FYP had more of.

The hypothesis: give users more to discover without giving them another reason to scroll endlessly

I started with lo-fi whiteboard sketches to test the simplest version of the idea: a second tab, sitting right next to Friends, that surfaces authentic content from outside a user's immediate circle. From there I moved into high-fidelity screens in Canva to pressure-test the interaction details - what shows up, what's hidden, and how the feed tells you it's finished.

That line does double duty: it tells the user the feed is finite on purpose, and it reinforces that Explore is a bounded companion to the Friends feed, not a competitor to it. This is the difference between designing for user well-being and product positioning versus designing purely for engagement - I chose the former, deliberately, even though it caps time-in-app.

What user testing told us

I ran focus groups and usability tests on the Explore concept to check whether the finite, guardrailed framing actually landed, or whether it just read as a missing feature. It held up on both counts.

That quote is the ultimate validation of the product thesis: the finite framing isn't a compromise users tolerate, it's the reason they trust the feature in the first place. Users want more to see - but only if BeReal doesn't become the app it was built to be an alternative to.

Why this matters to the business, not just the user

Voodoo acquired BeReal with a stated goal of reaching profitability through advertising, reporting €30M in 2025 revenue. Any feature pitch that stays purely in UX territory misses half the case - Explore has to serve that growth mandate too, not just make the app feel nicer to use.

That separation is the point. Ads and monetization pressure stay contained to a space users already understand as "more," while the Friends feed - the trust-critical, ad-free heart of the product - stays untouched. Explore doesn't just fix the bounce cycle; it gives Voodoo a growth lever that doesn't cost BeReal the authenticity that makes it worth acquiring in the first place.

Defining the right metrics for a finite feed

To evaluate if Explore successfully bridges the gap between engagement and authenticity without cannibalizing the core experience, I defined a strict set of Primary, Secondary, and Guardrail metrics for a beta rollout.

Final thoughts and next steps

I completed this externship culminating in a final pitch of BeReal Explore, which was awarded the Top 10% Performer distinction.

Designing this feature taught me how to navigate the delicate tension between user experience and business viability. It’s easy to say "don't build an infinite scroll because users hate it," but it takes rigorous product strategy to figure out how to drive MAU growth and ad inventory without relying on those dark patterns. I walked away with a sharpened product sense and a deep appreciation for the power of intentional friction.