One day while Evan Spiegel was in a product design class at Stanford University, he came up with an idea for an app that would allow people to send pictures that could only be seen for a limited period of time. He used the idea for his final project in the class and his fellow students loved it. Spiegel teamed up with his friend Reggie Brown to work on the app. Brown designed the ghost logo of the company and together they came up with the name “Picaboo” because the picture would be seen for a few seconds and disappear just like a person’s face in a game of peek-a-boo. Later on they brought in Bobby Murphy, a fraternity brother of Spiegel. Together, the three of them left college and launched their app under the name “Picaboo”, but later changed it to “Snapchat” and relaunched the app. Changing the name made it easier for people to understand exactly what the app was, and it proved to be a wise choice.
Snapchat has done extremely well and is used to send more than 500 million pictures and videos a day! Facebook saw the threat of Snapchat as the number of people in the same demographic as Snapchat users was going down that they needed to put a stop to it. Facebook offered Spiegel 3 BILLION DOLARS to sell his company to them, but he refused like a boss. It was a smart choice, because snapchat is now valued at over 10 billion dollars!
Although the company has had many lawsuits against it and there has been a lot of controversy surrounding image retrieval and where all the pictures go, the company continues to grow and Spiegel has done a great job of making the right decisions and keeping everything under control. It will be interesting to see what he will be doing with the company in the future as he tries to make new improvements to stay in the battle of the best social app.
It’s crazy that snapchat is valued at over 10 billion dollars, it seems like just yesterday i was sending my first snap. Part of me wonders how they will continue to stay on top, but then i remember all of the new features they have added like stories, and location stamps and things like that. i hope they always stay true to themselves and don’t try to change the app in order to try and compete with other top social media forms. I feel like sending pictures with no strings attached is something that people wont grow out of any time soon.
Snapchat is one of those aps that you almost hate when you see it but you cant resist. It is cool that you can send pics that everybody else can see for only a short amount of time, and also more risky because people will send weird stuff when they know it is untraceable and unable to be kept without the person who sent it knowing about a screenshot. It is amazing that it is worth 10 billion today just for satisfying a random need for random pictures.
I am amazed by the craze of SnapChat. Although personally I am not a fan, I respect how he has built his business and I’m sure he will continue to be successful in the future.
I think SnapChat is so much fun and the craze of it has certainly stuck with my friends and I.