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

Snapchat: The Ghost That Haunts Zuckerberg. Part four

The entry of Mark Zuckerberg to buying Snapchat.

 

Mark Zuckerberg emailed Evan inviting him to the Facebook campus, saying he loved what Snapchat was doing. The two arranged a meeting, where Mark essentially asked to buy the company. He said Evan and Bobby could stay in charge, but be backed by Facebooks’s resources.

Evan declined, saying they didn’t want to sell. At that moment, Mark Zuckerberg showed Evan a new app Facebook had created that they were about to release, called Poke. Which was a blatant copy of Snapchat. The features, the format, the layout, it was exactly the same. The implication was simple: you either join us, or we crush you with our own version of Snapchat.

Facebook of course had far more money and users, so it could quite literally be the end of Snapchat. Evan left the meeting and ordered a copy of the same book for every Snapchat employee,

The Art of War. If Zuckberg wanted a battle, Evan wasn’t going to go down without a fight. When Poke launched, Mark sent Evan one more email, just one sentence long: “I hope you enjoy Poke!”

Facebook’s new clone app immediately shot to the top of the app store, since they pushed a notification to all of their billion users. The Snapchat team was understandably panicked, and the thought must have crossed Evan’s mind that he should have sold out when he had the chance.

But, Poke very quickly fell back down the rankings, and basically faded into obscurity. Poke did not catch on at all. There are a couple of reasons.

Firstly, because it was a clone, it quite literally offered nothing different from Snapchat, so there was no incentive for users who liked Snapchat to switch.

Secondly, a lot of people liked Snapchat specifically because it was separate and closed off from

their other social media, they didn’t want something connected to their Facebook account.

So, Poke completely failed to take off, and within a couple of years Facebook would terminate it completely, not that anyone really noticed. And it got even worse for Zuckerberg - the whole incident gave Snapchat more publicity and proved to investors that Snapchat couldn’t just be easily replicated - it also proved there was clearly big potential with this disappearing photo concept if even Facebook

was trying to do it.

Evan would later call Poke “the greatest Christmas present we ever had”. In just one year, Snapchat had gone from an obscure unknown app to now having over a million daily active users, sending over a hundred million photos each day. “Snap me” had become a verb in the same way that people said “Google it”. Snapchat had taken on Facebook and won, or so it seemed. But Zuckerberg wasn’t going to give up that easily…

Click here to read the offer of three billion dollars from Mark Zuckerberg.