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…
Comments
Post a Comment