Unexpectedly, Tiktok became the most profitable app in 2020. It just blew up out of nowhere, and it became even bigger during the beginning of quarantine. I think one of the reasons why it became so big is because it solved our problem of boredom. When quarantine began, many of us thought we would be okay, but over time we became very bored. Before we knew it, we would just go straight to Tiktok whenever we had nothing to do. Not only is it quick, but time efficient as well; instead of going on Youtube to search for a tutorial, people could just go on Tiktok and watch a 30 second to a minute tutorial to quickly find out how to make something. For funding, I believe they had investors invest in their app, and also from in-app purchases of coins from their users. Their users are mainly of Gen Z; people ranging from ages 16-24 or even older use Tiktok, which is quite a large range. According to BBC, Tiktok did not originate from its current idea, but it originated with the apps Musical.ly and Douyin; the creator of Douyin believed it would be a good idea to combine the apps together to create what is now called Tiktok. I could not find any old pitch decks of Tiktok, but I did find a slide of their recent pitch deck on Google, shown below.

Sources:

• https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53640724
• https://www.chinabrands.com/dropshipping/article-tik-tok-business-model-16615.html
• https://www.investopedia.com/what-is-tiktok-4588933
• https://news.crunchbase.com/news/as-companies-battle-for-tiktok-a-look-back-at-its-funding-history/#:~:text=The%20company%20has%20raised%20at,China%2C%20SoftBank%20and%20General%20Atlantic.
• https://digiday.com/marketing/pitch-deck-what-tiktok-is-offering-european-advertisers/
  (Note about this link: Could not access full article on Digiday website, so I was only able to get this pitch deck slide from Digiday off of Google.)