It started with a few friends at Stanford University. Bobby Murphy, Evan Spiegel, and Reggie Brown designed a photo messaging app in 2011 with a unique feature: the photos you send are viewed once and not saved. They called their app “Picaboo” and mostly marketed it toward female users; as their product description put it, “Picaboo lets you send photos for peeks and not keeps!” However, they soon changed the app’s title to its current, household name: Snapchat.
By 2012, Snapchat catered to 100,000 daily users, but was only available on the Apple App Store. Later that year in October, Murphy, Spiegel, and Brown expanded their market to Google’s Android platform, causing their daily users to jump to over 1 million. Even though the company continued to grow and add new features and users to its app, it still had not made any profit by 2013. In addition, Reggie Brown left the company after a dispute and lawsuit. Things were not exactly fine and dandy for Snapchat. At this point, entrepreneurial powerhouse Mark Zuckerberg contacted Murphy and Spiegel and offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion. Murphy and Spiegel refused.
Over the next few years, Snapchat included more features, such as “My Story”, image filters, geo-filters, Lenses (dog ears, rainbow vomit, etc.), and Discover. The first few of these aspects of the app increased user interest, and the Discover feature allowed journalistic sources publish their content on Snapchat. The year of 2016 brought the launch of voice and video calling and stickers to the Chat feature, and Memories allowed users to save snaps and stories. Snapchat also incorporated Bitmoji, an avatar component, into the app, and they reached the milestone of 150 million daily users.
As of now, Snapchat is valued at about $20-25 billion. Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel took an idea from the ground floor to a multi-billion dollar company in less than six years. They did so through many factors, but most importantly through patience and strategic marketing. With the addition of geo-filters, Murphy and Spiegel allowed outside companies and individuals to sponsor filters for snaps. Furthermore, the Discovery component opened Snapchat to journalistic sources to publish their content on the app. Both of these innovations brought in immense amounts of revenue and new users for Snapchat. Murphy and Spiegel could have easily given up hope after not making any profit. They could have sold their app to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and walked away with a huge lump of cash ($3 billion). But they didn’t; they persevered. They knew that they had created a unique, marketable app, and they marketed it successfully. As a result, the pair ended up making seven to eight times (and counting) what Zuckerberg offered. Their creativity and innovation not only revolutionized photo messaging apps, but also gave birth to a whole new form of social media. Some might say their patience paid off.
Snapchat is just another way the world is becoming increasingly more interconnected. Snapchat may not have been created to help businesses with marketing, but it has opened yet another online opportunity for marketers to engage their customers. I predict that we will see more and more businesses trying to make it on Snapchat because of how many young people use the app. If businesses can build a positive relationship with consumers from their early teen years, it will bring in great amounts of revenue for them over the course of that consumer’s life.
Snapchat is a great social media service, however it did start with “unclear” and “shady” intentions…
But, today, it really turned around and I personally use it every day. It’s such an easy way to stay in touch with friends and have large groups of people stay interconnected throughout the day.
Great post!
It really surprised me how Snapchat didn’t do so well at first because looking at it today it is easy to see that it is one of the most popular social media services out there. This does however, go to show that even the largest and most successful companies are going to have “bumps in the road” at some point.
It is incredible how a company can start as one idea and be crafted into something new, desirable and profitable. Although snapchat may not have started as the company it is today, it quickly evolved into one of the most desirable millennial social media platforms in existence. This doesn’t come without challenge, as we see Snapchat introducing new features constantly to keep users engaged and continue to grow its user base.