Discord was (and still is) a great product. But those that used it in the very early days will remember - as users in this reddit thread[1] do - that the early days were pretty rough, and not quite the "10x better" described here. Yet still, it grew. Why?
In startup mythology there's a belief that you need to build a "10x better" product in order to get people to switch to it. This is generally good advice, because in most spaces it's hard to get people to try your product at all, and it's even harder to get people to actually switch to it.
Gaming is different, though. Gaming communities aren't generally using your product for business-critical functions, are generally extremely receptive to trying new things, and are often led by enthusiast early adopters. As a result, gaming communities have uncharacteristically low switching costs. This explains why Discord was able to move gaming communities far more quickly than could ever be done with (for instance) corporate customers.
My hypothesis: Discord built a compelling product, and succeeded at talking to their early users and improving the product far faster than competitors. Because they built it for gamers, they didn't need to be 10x better right away: they just needed to be faster (and to stay alive in the meantime).
If the above is true, the risk is that - especially as they move away from gaming and as they continue to move much more slowly than before - they can also lose that community to a better product very quickly, in exactly the same way.
Only time will tell if this is true or not, but since we launched our chat product in May we've been seeing support of it in the form of accelerating growth and in the form of entire large communities migrating from Discord to Guilded every day.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/j8siby/discord_...