Imagine, it’s 2011 and your spring semester of college. You’re sitting in your product design class. Your project is to come 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.