The untold story of Snapchat what make millionaires and a Ghost that Haunts Mark Zuckerberg part three

Snapchat: The Ghost That Haunts Zuckerberg. Part three

Hockey stick growth of Snapchat.

 But most people just didn’t seem to get the appeal. And then, quite suddenly, everything changed. Snapchat suddenly got a huge uptick in users from one specific group. teenagers. And the number of users started growing rapidly every month.  What was two thousand daily active users in December became twenty thousand daily active users in January.

Snapchat was essentially going viral amongst a younger user base who shared it with their friends, who shared it with their friends, and so on. A huge factor in this was that Snapchat was in many ways the opposite of other popular social media.

With sites like Facebook, people’s parents and even grandparents had started joining, whereas Snapchat felt more like a small private club for friends. And even more importantly, with Facebook and Instagram teenagers felt more pressured to post the most glamorous filtered versions of their life, whereas because photos on Snapchat disappeared, people could send casual authentic images. They could send quick little snapshots of their life throughout the day, rather than trying to create a perfect image, and this meant people used Snapchat much more often.

Plus, since the platform didn’t have likes, retweets, or any other metrics - it felt much more fun. The rapid growth in users helped Snapchat secure funding from investors, meaning Evan could begin hiring a bigger team to help grow the business. It was starting to seem Snapchat could be a legitimate communication tool.

Of course, not everyone saw it that way. When the media wrote about Snapchat, many still saw it as a gimmick or a sexting app, no matter how much Evan tried to change that narrative. The sexting component was even more troubling given how young Snapchat’s users were. And whilst Snapchat technically didn’t allow anyone under the age of 13, they didn’t actually have any way of enforcing that policy.

But the truth is Snapchat genuinely did have a lot of use cases. Teenagers essentially started using Snapchat instead of text messaging. Rather than send someone just a message, they could send a photo of them in that moment with a short caption. It felt more personal.

However, now that Snapchat was starting to get popular, Reggie returned - and he filed a lawsuit against Evan and Bobby, claiming he’d been unfairly kicked out. The whole process was brutal and dragged on for months, which took a toll on all three founders.

But eventually, a settlement would be reached for Reggie to get a lump sum payment, in exchange for never speaking about Snapchat again. Meanwhile, Snapchat users were continuing to increase rapidly, and by October 2012, twenty million photos were sent each day on the app.

And when Snapchat introduced video messages a few months later, things only skyrocketed further. But it wasn’t just teenagers who were paying attention to Snapchat - there was one man in particular who’d been watching very closely, and was ready to make his move…

Click here to read theentry of Mark Zuckerberg.