At the young age of 22, Evan Spiegel began his path to becoming a billionaire and became a co-founder of Snapchat. “Spiegel’s story is a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of understanding market needs. His ability to adapt Snapchat’s offerings to the ever-changing landscape of social media has kept the platform relevant and made it a staple in the daily lives of millions.” Speigel took an idea and a different approach to social media and created a platform that made him a billionaire. The co-founders hated how all social media felt permanent, so they launched “Picaboo,” an app where photos would disappear. They later forced one of the co-founders out and relaunched as Snapchat.
Archive for Snapchat
When I think of innovative ideas that have shaped today’s culture, I think of social media. It is said that over 60% of the world is on some form of social media, which is extremely impressive given the newness of major social media platforms. One social media that is particularly innovative is Snapchat. Typically, social media platforms allow users to share pictures to friends with a caption, and comments or reactions can be added to posts. With Snapchat, pictures with captions are exchanged between one person to another for a few seconds, and are then deleted forever.
One of the masterminds behind this innovative platform is Evan Spiegel. Spiegel co-founded Snapchat with a college friend at Stanford in 2011, and quickly gained immense wealth. By the time Spiegel was 25, he was officially a billionaire. He is now worth upwards of $3 billion. Spiegel was able to use his knowledge of app development, as well as his real world knowledge of social media to develop one of the biggest social media platforms to date.
One thing that is very inspiring about this is how Spiegel entered into an already booming marketplace, and was able to come out as one of the social media masterminds. Although Snapchat has had its legal issues and its many problems, it has proven to be a social media that is here to stay, and that is thanks to Evan Spiegel and his genius in the social media realm.
Garrett Gee is one of the founders of Scan Inc., a company focused on the QR code industry from a new and innovative angle. The company began out of an idea Garrett and his classmates came up with for a project in his entrepreneurship course at BYU. They decided to put their idea into action, which ended up making them millionaires. Scan is a downloadable app that allows people to make their own QR codes that can link to more than just a website. It also allows you to scan a barcode to check a price on an item. With a wider variety of codes you can scan, this company was immediately very popular to multiple large investors. The app blew up as soon as Garrett and his team launched it, and he went on Shark Tank to pitch his idea. Although he did not secure a deal with a shark, the additional publicity for his business only made it that much more popular. Garrett ended up selling Scan Inc. to Snapchat for $54 million.
These young and successful entrepreneurs are perfect examples of true innovators. They saw that the QR code system had more potential than it was being used for, so they decided to do something about it. Although they very well could have moved on from this idea, especially since it was an idea for their class, I am inspired by their follow through with the project. I am especially inspired by Garrett because he demonstrated his determination throughout the building of the company through his passion and drive to “connect the real world with the digital universe”.
I have learned that we have the power to “change the world from our college dorm rooms”, as Garrett said. With technology advancing, it could be any second that a million dollar idea comes to us. When approaching innovation, it is important not to limit yourself by self doubt because the world truly is at our fingertips.
Fanbytes CEO Timothy Armoo displays that in the world of entrepreneurship, age is truly just a number. He began his professional career at the age of fourteen by creating a tutoring company and later sold another media company at seventeen years old. Armoo’s experience in that company exposed him to various social media platforms and the advertising on them. This helped him to formulate a unique buisness idea: advertising on social media platforms.
Timothy Armoo created Fanbytes at the age of twenty years old with the intention to innovate upon the advertising industry. In an interview with Forbes, Armoo stated “for too long ads have represented an interruption or intrusion on our daily lives rather than a seamless part of them.” Fanbytes aims to target younger audiences by promoting advertising on social media platforms. They also use the popularity of social media influencers to enhance the effectiveness of their ads. When asked why he focuses on social media for his advertisements, Armoo stated “for me and my age group, our smartphones are where we get all our information, so deciding what industry I wanted to be in was a pretty easy decision.”
Timothy Armoo, CEO of Fanbytes
Fanbytes has been very successful at reaching younger audiences through social media. They currently advertise for large companies such as McDonald’s, Warner Brothers, Tidal, and more. Their primary areas of social media influence extend to Snapchat, Instagram, and most recently Tik Tok. Forbes shows that 60% of people skip native Snapchat advertisements. Fanbytes boasts a 90% completion rate when they are involved with Snapchat ads. Timothy Armoo said in an interview with Forbes that many companies are giving up on advertising in Snapchat while he sees opportunity in that area, simply stating “their mistake.” Fanbytes hopes to take on AR (Augmented Reality) in the future by aiding companies with advertising on the platform. Armoo finished his interview with Forbes by saying “we are a group of 19-22 year olds who are reversing the code of Snapchat and are building a large underbelly business on it.”
Sources:
https://fanbytes.co.uk/about-us/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/montymunford/2018/01/31/fanbytes-cracks-the-code-for-snapchat-ads-and-augmented-reality/#2c7c5c895f63
https://www.forbes.com/sites/edmundingham/2015/10/02/meet-the-millennials-at-fanbytes-redefining-how-brands-market-to-other-millennials/#1acefee172de
Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy were students at Stanford University. Spiegel thought of the idea for a social media platform that stood out from the competition. Spiegel saw potential in the unique app where one’s messages disappear after sending and recruited Murphy to help him make this idea a reality. Now at only 28 years old, Spiegel is said to have a net worth of approximately 3 billion dollars. The duo took inspiration from existing platforms, but from that, they were able to make something much different than any other social media site and it proved to be wildly profitable. 
Imagine, it’s 2011 and your spring semester of college. You’re sitting in your product design class. Your project is to com
e with an idea for a product. You come up with an idea for an app. That’s the story of how Snapchat was founded. Evan Spiegel was a product design major at Stanford University when he and his friends Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown came up with the idea for Picaboo, an app that shared messages and videos that would disappear shortly after they were sent. It distinguished itself from other messaging apps, because, unlike them, the pictures would be deleted within a short time frame after they were sent. The creators of Snapchat observed that people didn’t need these pictures saved forever, and how sometimes people preferred to show others a picture for a little while.
The app was launched in 2011 as Picaboo. The target audience for the app was women, but it became popular with people of all ages and demographics. The name was changed from Picaboo to Snapchat pretty early on because the creators discovered that it was already the name of picture printing service based in New Hampshire.
Snapchat took off in popularity after its release, and by June 2016, Snapchat more than 150 million daily users. Companies who have tried to buy the app to get into on its success have tried and failed. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy Snapchat, but he was turned down. Whether or not they could get the rights or not, owners of similar companies have used some of Snapchat’s features on their apps, such as the story feature, which have been added to both Facebook and Instagram.
In addition to its successes, Snap Inc has had several failed ideas over the years. In 2018, the app was redesigned in an update, and many users complained about the changes. 1.2 million people petitioned the company to convince them to change the design back. In 2013, Snapchat created SnapKidz, an app that included some of Snapchat’s features, and targeted kids under 13, the age you have to be to use Snapchat. Snapkidz included the photo and video features and filters offered by Snapchat but didn’t include the Messaging or Friends features. It has been discontinued and there is no information about it on the Snapchat website. In spite of these failed enterprises, Snapchat has remained one of the most popular social media apps and has changed the way that people message each other online.