[Too late to edit the parent] The metric to monitor for Snap is daily engagement. Snap has all but confirmed it will not play the MAU game [0]. This doesn't me

[Too late to edit the parent] The metric to monitor for Snap is daily engagement. Snap has all but confirmed it will not play the MAU game [0]. This doesn't mean Snap won’t try to expand the user base, but merely that maximizing MAUs isn’t the same priority as at Facebook. This strategy is risky because it means Snap must generate growth from somewhere other than user acquisition, which is the typical playbook for consumer startups. On the plus side, this frees Snap to pursue an Apple-like strategy of pushing the boundaries of coolness and innovation as opposed to diluting the service until it's vanilla enough to reach 1B+ users. The more mainstream your aims, the fewer risks you can afford with the core product. Strategically, it may let Snap sidestep the trap that ensnared Twitter. Twitter’s greatest sin was simply not being Facebook. Wall Street and the media need a foil for every market leader, and Twitter has been sadly shoved into this role. Playing the MAU game is playing Facebook’s game, and Zuckbergerg has so far dominated anyone who competes. Focusing on daily engagement offers a chance to battle the lion in water instead of on land, to position Snap as different from Facebook and pioneering a different market. Unseating Facebook as the #1 social network is extremely daunting for Snap, if not downright impossible. As Twitter today and AMD from the 1990s can attest, life as the #2 player can be challenging. Wall Street whacks you with much lower multiples, and the press is hardly any kinder. Whether Snap actually convinces Wall Street and others to value them as different from Facebook remains to be seen, but this route is not surprising given Twitter’s carnage. Even if Snap stumbles, what Spiegel and Murphy accomplished is nothing short of extraordinary. They grew a pure sexting app into a $30B communication and entertainment platform. This transformation didn't result from one "lucky" choice, but rather a series of risks and enhancements over multiple years. If you had given me 4-5 years to maximize the value of a sexting app, I think maybe, in the most optimistic scenario, with all the luck in the world, the app could have sold for $3M (with $0 as the likely scenario). What they did is 10000x greater than what I could have achieved under the same circumstances. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-20/snap-said-to-stress-addicted-users-to-justify-20-billion-value https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-20/snap-said...