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Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

352 points by cpeterso 8y ago

A7med 8y ago
The discover shit what made me delete Snapchat, keeps throwing annoying people at my face every time I open the app, why? it was a fun way to chat with friends and share short videos but no let fill it with booty shaking and nasty stuff and force you to watch it
Yhippa 8y ago
Why did they ignore Android usability and performance for so long? Also, I guess one of the cool things was the mystery meat UX but I wonder if that hurt them as they tried to garner broad appeal? Sometimes I see other people's Snaps and have no idea how they did certain things like effects, text, or interactive elements.
- shanghaiaway 8y ago
  Snapchat didn't have to be a fad. Spiegels incompetence as a CEO and as a product person killed the business.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  Yeah, I think instagram has eaten snapchats lunch just by having a much better (more performant) implementation. The snapchat app are so much more battery than anything else on my phone that I've actually completely uninstalled it, even though I quite liked using it.
- addicted 8y ago
  They explicitly focused on teens in rich countries with high end phones and high speed mobile connections. They wanted to target that “rich” niche.
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  Market segmentation. Apple users are worth more money. Which kinda makes this pivot to the developing world a bit of head scratcher. High ARPC was one of the key differentiators they promoted back during their IPO.
shanghaiaway 8y ago
I read the whole memo, or tried to. Ridiculous. It means nothing at all. One OKR is "spread positivity". What does that even mean? How is it measurable? https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-company-memo-on-2019-strategic-goals-and-profitability https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-company-mem...
- PhoenixReborn 8y ago
  Indeed. Looking at their OKRs, the only one I can see turning it around for them is "Lead the Way in Augmented Reality". The others are fluff in wording and in punch, and I can't see them gaining ground against IG when IG executes on these ideas much better than Snap does.
ForHackernews 8y ago
Maybe this will be the beginning of the end for the social media bubble?
- Kaveren 8y ago
  Is there really a bubble? The players look fairly solidified to me. You have Facebook, which might not be as cool in all countries with younger users, and has had a lot of controversy surrounding fake news, election influence, and privacy, but it's doing well. You have Instagram, which is doing very well, was a great Facebook acquisition, helping their parent company even more. You have Twitter, which seems to be struggling by, and is still very relevant. Reddit is doing very well if you can even call it social meddia. Apps like Yik Yak, Whisper, Snapchat, and such all seem to have been going downhill or are gone for some time now. But I think the players we have are here to stay.
  - mcintyre1994 8y ago
    Reddit is certainly trying to pivot toward social media, with probably the least enthusiasistic and most hostile user base for that change they could possibly have.
    - artursapek 8y ago
      The magic of reddit has always been in its detachment from real-world social structure. Reddit is successful because it grouped users by common interests and eliminated the burden of having your real identity associated with your online alter-ego. If they ruin that in an effort to sell more ads, it will be a sad loss.
    - dbbk 8y ago
      Reddit has always been social media, unless you're thinking of a different definition of it?
  - askafriend 8y ago
    You've also got LinkedIn which is doing well by all accounts (even after the Microsoft exit). And Nextdoor which is much younger but cemented itself with steady growth and a unique network. I don't think any of these companies will have trouble making substantial money at scale for the foreseeable future. Snap's problems are unique to Snap.
georgespencer 8y ago
Here's coverage without an insanely user hostile "WE ARE PART OF OATH YOUR PRIVACY IS IMPORTANT (BUT IT'S DIFFICULT TO FIND SETTINGS TO DISABLE COOKIES)" lightbox which cannot be dismissed: https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-company-memo-on-2019-strategic-goals-and-profitability https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-company-mem...
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  It has autoplaying video with sound instead... Brave new world indeed.
  - georgespencer 8y ago
    Ah apologies - I block that by default. I haven't yet found a way to block the stupid GDPR cookie pop ups.
    - driverdan 8y ago
      Firefox + NoScript works great.
    - tajen 8y ago
      In addition to the Do Not Track/DNT header, we’ll soon need a Do Not GDPR Me, Do Not Cookie-Warn Me, and No I Won’t Subscribe to Your Newsletter. I’d love the European Commission to make it forbidden to show popups on a website, to complete the irony.
    - Hoasi 8y ago
      Brave browser takes care of that too.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Alternatively, disable JS: the page looks perfect, just the article and its images. I have to congratulate the TC frontend devs.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
Did Snapchat really flop, or is the equity market undergoing a correction and return to sanity? Snapchat was a fun fad, not a sustainable enterprise. Everyone involved should have taken money off the table in the high times and realized the bubble component would pop.
- askafriend 8y ago
  You can call it a fad, but the truth is that they had and still have the opportunity to build a real business. The reality is that despite how seemingly old the internet is, we're still in the relatively early stages. There aren't that many companies globally building content systems at scale and working through the challenges of what that means - at scale. Those skills in an organization are extraordinary valuable as old media starts to crumble and information infrastructure on the internet becomes the new fundamental fabric of society - moreso than even today. I know that sounds a bit grandoise but that's the thinking behind the big bets behind companies like this. If Snap can just get some experienced, less impulsive leadership in place - they can still build an extremely valuable global media property. 180mm daily actives is no joke. As you can tell, I'm skeptical of Snap in it's current state of management but I'm bullish on social media overall.
thosakwe 8y ago
I used to be a heavy user of Snapchat, and fall into its dominant demographic - young* (edit, had forgotten this word) users. I remember buying stock in the company, and the same week, their big update rolling out, and quite literally burying my friends and their stories underneath the "overcrowded pile of clickbait" mentioned in the article. That, I believe, is where Snap really went wrong, and what drove 3 million users away from its platform. When you combine Instagram's own story implementation with the fact that Snap's focus seems to be mainly on Discover from this point, it seems unlikely to me that they'll ever regain the interest of people who abandoned it back in February. It will be interesting to see which changes they roll out in the months to come, but honestly, as long as the Discover page has even less meaningful content than a Taboola "Content you May Like" block, I can't foresee it being a real draw in for new users.
- 21 8y ago
  I don't have many friends on Snapchat, but I follow a lot of celebrities. Literally the same week, 90% of them stopped posting, and it never recovered. Now it's a ghost town. People who followed friends got hit, people who follow celebrities got hit, I just don't get it what was on their mind.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jboy55 8y ago
    I would have to wonder how many true celebrities, people whose fame come from outside of social media, felt the same frustrations at not being able to see their friends feeds as other users.
- sytelus 8y ago
  Why they didn’t do extensive internal testing before rolling out such a huge UX changes? At least they should have rolled it out to smaller groups, measure metrics and expand group over time. The general rule in UX update is that larger the changes, longer it needs the A/B testing for impact on metrics. All botched UX updates have root cause in circumventing this rule by some passionate folks.
kposehn 8y ago
Snapchat has failed the test of feature vs. product. Everything that made Snapchat unique is something easily emulated in a myriad of other apps. When you strip away the interface, the only unique part of it was the network/aggregator-effect they have. However, they were much smaller than Instagram and as a result would be fighting an uphill battle with a product that already has the network and could easily duplicate the features.
- askafriend 8y ago
  I think of any social media company as an interface into a network. If the network isn't fundamentally the moat then that's a problem because the interface can often (but maybe not always) be a commodity. In the early stages, a small social media company may use its novel interface as the moat. Interface moats can be fragile but they buy the company some time to grow the network and gives the initial set of early adopters a reason to join. However at maturity, the interface alone can't continue to be the only thing that can defend or provide a moat for a business. The problem with Snap (as you pointed out) is that the network characteristics are similar to Facebook's or Instagram's....aka friends and family....aka people in your phone contacts. Facebook's fundamental value is that they were one of the first ones to capture the graph that already existed in your phone and brought it online at scale. However, the actual network they built isn't as novel or as difficult to build as something like Twitter which is a graph that existed nowhere else before. LinkedIn is similar to Facebook in that the business contacts probably already existed in your phone or on a bunch of business cards. But because we don't want our professional lives and our personal lives to share the same spaces, LinkedIn was able to capture the professional opportunity by bringing business contacts online. What does this all have to do with Snap? Well Snap has the unfortunate position of having similar network characteristics to Facebook's while also being in a similar social space albeit heavily skewed younger (I consider Instagram to be in a roughly similar social space). Snap probably felt like the demographic skew alone would be enough to balance out this weak position but I suspect they're finding out quickly that it is not since Instagram is proving to be a thriving space for young people too. On the other hand, networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Nextdoor are all either unique networks underneath the primary interface or they share different social spaces that people usually don't want mixed. Anyone can make an interface but it's incredibly hard to grow a network in a particular social space. The latter almost always makes for a stronger moat. Snap needs to figure out how to make progress on the latter because I think many of their large problems stem from not having enough of a moat at the network level.
cpitman 8y ago
Coming off of the recent SEC case against Elon Musk, does anyone know how they look at leaks from public companies, especially high impact ones like this? Are there any examples of SEC action in the past?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  The SEC allows companies to make corporate announcements through social media. Tweets of a public company’s CEO are thus corporate announcements. Leaks are reported on by third parties, and thus don’t fall under the same rules. The leaker might get in trouble for Reg FD violations, or for violating an NDA, but given the reduced risk of damage (particularly when the leaked information is not fabricated), it’s been a low enforcement priority.
- aetherson 8y ago
  I don't think that there's any kind of SEC impact to memos that talk about strategy and product goals. It's different if you offer material previously non-public finding info, as Musk did.
Kaveren 8y ago
I don't use Snapchat, but now I understand why the redesign I saw so much hate on was pushed into production. I can't speak to the specifics of what changed, but I don't see why you wouldn't even A/B test such a massive change to your service. Instagram Stories seem like they might've had a big impact on the popularity of the app as well.
iamleppert 8y ago
They had a working thing and then ruined it. I’m not sure how they managed to do that with a product change. Didn’t they have a way to release changes and measure impact before just forcing it on their entire user base? Once a company gets to this level, they need to recognize the role that luck played into their original product and design. They hit a resonance with people, and it was probably more luck and timing than anything else. Changes to that core product need to be treated as an experiment and conducted as such. Show some discipline. You can still innovate but those ideas should be made to stand on their own, grow on their own. Just because you have control over a platform with millions of users and can make changes doesn’t automatically mean you can do no wrong at this point. It just means you will have more time and resources before those mistakes take you out of the game completely. He should be punished for his mistakes by the board installing some experienced adult supervision for a while until he shows he can fix his current mess (reverse negative growth) and innovate in at least an additional major product category tangential to Snap. If he can’t do that in the next 24 months, he should step down for the good of the company.
- ethbro 8y ago
  I think it's unsurprising when founders of unicorns eschew A/B testing in favor of vision. Admitting part of their success was luck is tantamount to admitting "I went from nothing to a billionaire because the dice came up right." I don't know many people who would be comfortable truly accepting that. And even fewer who could do so AND be the type of driven person necessary. All while everyone around you is looking to you for answers.
  - ljm 8y ago
    Purely anecdotally, the one place I worked at that embraced A/B testing went to such an extreme that it stifled the vision. It became so risk averse that nothing was really happening, yet at the same time the business was not in the place to sustain growth or even profit that way. This is because the introduction of such a data driven mentality meant the only people empowered to suggest decisions or experiments or approve the work were all in marketing. Because they were basically deciding what workload they wanted and of course you won’t put more on your plate if you don’t have to. This isn’t to say it’s about data vs. vision. The original success is usually created in large part due to a healthy collaboration between the visionaries, the engineers, and whoever else is in the mix. Once you take one part of the team out of the equation and tend too heavily towards a particular bias then you might well have lost the secret to the initial success.
endlessvoid94 8y ago
They're fucked.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  Please post something useful, insightful or worthy of discussion. Otherwise, don't post at all. Thank you.
  - vntok 8y ago
    Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
    - fermienrico 8y ago
      Thanks, I didn’t realize I can flag it. I shall do that going forward.
pavlov 8y ago
”Adults, not teens. Messaging, not Stories. Developing markets, not the U.S.” So... Snap basically wants to be Facebook? Adults, messaging, developing world — Facebook is already enormously entrenched in the overlap of those markets thanks to Messenger and WhatsApp. FB has also shown the ability to clone Snap’s product innovations. I have a feeling 2019 is the year when Snap is acquired. The market cap is already below $10 billion.
- Theodores 8y ago
  The USP of Snapchat was that parents could not go through past messages as these would get deleted once read. So, if you had planned a night out on the town doing silly things you could still pretend to the parents that you would being having a sleep over at a best friend's house. Even if they went through the phone with a fine toothcomb the parents would not find evidence of plans for wrong-doing. Facebook is not about regularly messaging your best friends, it is about messaging/stalking people you knew from school onwards up to now, including workmates, parents and other people you don't message important things to, such as plans for tonight. Snap are pretending here that their 'besties' market isn't already consumed by WhatsApp!, which it is, so Facebook have already eaten their lunch there. They don't actually acknowledge their 'secret sauce' in this memo, which was the instantly deleting messages that appeal to teens.
  - frankydp 8y ago
    I also viewed Snap as an platform built on a single missing SMS feature, temporal messages. They have added a bunch of other stuff, but that single feature was always the adoption driver, and eventually users figured out screenshots trump deletion. I also thought that the other features were in direct conflict with that adoption driver, as in actively providing negative user incentives for continued use.
- abakker 8y ago
  Who would be the buyer, though? Microsoft? Alibaba? I can't see many acquirers wanting to get into the competitions that snapchat has gotten themselves into.
throwaway901234 8y ago
A lot of Bay Area companies subscribe to the "make the world a better place" mantra. To me, the original meaning was to create (technology?) products that make things possible or just easier. However, that's not Silicon Valley's take. People take it as a green light to take their morals (what they think is "good" - including their political views), and then, through their employer's product, impose those morals onto the user base. Some are fairly benign. "Positivity is good", albeit a simplistic view of the world, isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. The standard modern approach of "create a metric, optimize" comes into play. Might result in things like highlighting "positive" content and downplaying "negative" content. Some are slightly more questionable. Every SV app (including those that are absolutely not related in any way) is trying to get people to vote. So, in a "vacuum", voting is good. However, CA is left-leaning - so, why is this only a thing during Trump and wasn't done during Obama? The usage demographics of these apps are also left-leaning - these calls to action for voting are affecting the distribution of voters - if they truly wanted an impartial result, they should show the "vote" banner to a uniform distribution of people (through subsampling). I'm looking at Reddit and Discord here.
- addicted 8y ago
  GOTV in apps was fairly common during the Obama years as well. In a democracy there is only one correct side in the “get more people to vote” and “get less people to vote” argument. The fact that some think getting more people to vote is a partisan endeavor says more about the anti democratic leanings of one side of the partisan divide than anything else. (Edited)
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    It is partisan because because people’s votes are predictable. An armed forces GOTV is going to benefit one side, an African American GOTV is going to benefit the other. Who a GOTV targets shows which side they are on.
- Retra 8y ago
  What's next? Politicians informing people of their stances will now be seen as "influencing the outcome of elections"; an obviously unreasonable partisan tactic. If you tell someone what they should do -- or now even ask them to make their own decisions -- you're an enemy of democracy, I suppose. Funneling millions anonymously into super-PAC campaigns is ok, but telling people to vote... that's too much politics for a company. Critical thinking also means analyzing your own biases, not just those of others.
anilshanbhag 8y ago
Lost in all this is an important distinction that Snapchat wanted to make: they wanted to separate friends from influencers / celebrities / media. It was a good change. Another important thing Snapchat does is it doesn't show likes / followers publicly - when the whole world is chasing these numbers Snapchat has taken stance against it. The general philosophy they follow makes me think this is short term pain and the company will do fine in the long run.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- solarkraft 8y ago
  It was a terrible change. People (most heavily: kids) like to consider celebrities their friends. People loved the close, barely filtered connection Snapchat gave them.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Why did Snapchat feel so strongly that it was necessary to separate them? Neither Instagram nor Twitter separate friends from influencers/celebrities/media, and that seems to work fine.
  - dbbk 8y ago
    My understanding is that it was a philosophical standpoint Evan took, not 'Snapchat' as a whole necessarily.
- dannyw 8y ago
  I'd love to hear why you think that separating friends from influencers, celebrity, or media is a good change. The last element I get somewhat, but I don't think anyone has a conceptual issue identifying who is a fried and who is an influencer, and being able to see stories with minimal friction was a major draw for me.
  - sytelus 8y ago
    I follow few friends and non-friends on FB and they are very distinct entities. The non-friends I follow are because of some common interest like a research field or outdoor sport. I would be happy to see weekend yard work photos from my friend but I wouldn’t care so much of that from non-friends. The intent of why I follow these two classes is very different. However Snapchat crowd might be different as I understand. Young folks would tend to consider both classes as same.
radiantswirl 8y ago
It disgusts me how Spiegel uses the royal "We" throughout this memo to distract from the fact that he himself was the (sole?) driving force behind the terrible decisions he now regrets. Own your shit Spiegel, using the royal "we" to deflect blame from your own bad decisions does not show maturity, it shows the opposite. Miranda Kerr is swiping through her Raya app looking for a dalliance on the side because "for some reason Evan just isn't giving her what she needs anymore" in 3...2...1......
gaius 8y ago
Snapchat is still bleeding money, losing $353 million last quarter. I literally do not understand what they can be spending that much money on, can anyone clue me in? It can't be on infra and bandwidth.
- joubert 8y ago
  For the year ending 12/31/2017 it looks like $1.5 billion in R&D and $2 billion in sales, general, and admin expenses. https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/snap/financials?query=income-statement https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/snap/financials?query=income-s... Q1 2018 financials here: https://investor.snap.com/news-releases/2018/05-01-2018-211516272 https://investor.snap.com/news-releases/2018/05-01-2018-2115...
- addicted 8y ago
  For one thing, they are contractually obligated to pay Google and Amazon at least $600mm per year for the next few years. So that’s $150mm per quarter, as a minimum (if their usage doesn’t meet that amount they have to pay the difference). They are paying something like $200mm on R&D/quarter, and over $100mm on advertising and administrative each. Their “cost of revenues” (I’m not exactly sure what this means for them...I wonder if it is discounts offered to advertisers) is another $190mm. So a few hundred million here and a few hundred million there adds up to a $350mm quarterly loss. What’s interesting is their R&D expenses have dropped 20% from the year ago quarter, while their sales and marketing have increased substantially. That does not bode well for the future either in my opinion (although it’s easily arguable that even $200mm per quarter on R&D seems excesssive for Snap). Edit: I quickly compared them to Twitter, which isn’t known as the most leanest of run companies in the first place, but Twitter’s R&D costs are $139mm/quarter compared to over $200mm for SNAP. Their administraative costs are $74mm/quarter, compared to over $100mm for SNAP. How is SNAP spending so much more money than Twitter, and clearly producing a fraction of the output?
rhizome 8y ago
15 pages? It's not a leak if it's meant to get out, and 15 pages means it was meant to get out.
logicallee 8y ago
>The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate,” Spiegel stresses throughout the memo regarding “Project Cheetah.” Hmmmmmmmmmm. The Google Mail redesign comes to mind. Gmail has 1.4 billion users. (April 2018 figure, Gmail's Wikipedia page.) Google management, if you're listening: the writing is on the wall. You have it there black and white: "The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest" In this comment I outline some reach goals for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17873576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17873576 (That comment is written in a wishful style, what I know you can do and what I imagine you can do.) You can do it! Just hire the best. Put the best on that team. 1.2 billion users mean you can afford it. You can do it. Do it. You can do it. I believe in you with all my heart.
willio58 8y ago
As a college student who’s only social media comes through Snapchat, I’m glad that they will be making changes. The redesign doesn’t make much sense and just made things more confusing if anything. I have 12+ friends in a group which we use to coordinate hanging out and to generally chat about things we find interesting. I haven’t used the stories functionality in over a year. I really think the move to focusing on chat is the way to go, even though there’s a lot of competition there. I started on Facebook at 12 years old when it first became popular, I’ve gone through many platforms but dropped them all and I’ve been using only Snapchat for over 4 years now and it seems to have the perfect level of privacy. It also doesn’t feed as much into the whole “look at how awesome my life is compared to yours” trap of facebookish platforms, at least the way my friends use it.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  Just curious (I don't use Snapchat as I'm a fair bit older then the target demographic), why do you use it to chat rather than an actual IM? Eg Telegram or Discord or Wire.
  - n767 8y ago
    I'm not OP but I use Snapchat a lot to chat. I like that the messages are not saved, it feels more natural for me as in I don't have to "think" too much about what I write, just as talking. This way it feels less staged, you can compare it to photos on insta vs photos on snap (likes and permanent vs none of that). With text it's obviously to a lesser extend but still. No one can go through years of messages and see what i said back then.
jorblumesea 8y ago
I'm not sure they can make a comeback, Instagram ripped off all the good parts and executed on their vision better. Adding all of the celebrity ads and discover feature was a huge mistake, all users wanted to do was communicate with their friends.
14 8y ago
They forced me off their platform. I have an older iPhone 4s and can not update past ios 9.3.5. Snapchat eventually forced an update and that required me having the latest ios which I could not even do since Apple stopped supporting this device years ago despite it still being a pretty good phone.
mindgam3 8y ago
Give credit where credit is due. Spiegel is digging deep, showing humility, and asking the right questions after Snap has been flailing for a long time. The crux of the issue is that they haven't launched anything fundamentally innovative and game-changing since the original Snapchat, which went insanely viral in the teen demographic. In this sense they are following a similar path as Bebo, where I worked before they were acquired by AOL. Launch viral product to teens, blow up huge, score huge business deals, and then growth stagnates because it turns out the original vision only encompassed a product, not an entire platform. Bebo ended up selling to AOL right before it became clear the entire business model was failing thanks to Facebook. I saw a comment below about 2019 being the year that Snap is acquired. I could very much see that happening. The only thing that would turn things around is if Spiegel can pull another rabbit out of his hat and launch a category-defining product somewhere. Augmented Reality could be where they do it. They did fail miserably with Spectacles, their first take on smartglasses, but again, give credit to them for having the balls to invest in hardware and ship a product. That said, the fact that they shipped a v2 of Spectacles that didn't fix any of the core problems with the original isn't a good sign. Still, augmented reality is going to be the future of computing when it merges with consumer wearables. It's early days in this market. Every Big Tech company is racing to launch the iPhone of smartglasses. Snap has managed to be the first to launch consumer glasses with a camera. If they can pull their sh*t together and ship something that is actually useful and doesn't look ridiculous, they could still emerge as a dominant player.
- joering2 8y ago
  Snap was first? We forgetting Google Glasses I guess. Google tried but clearly market maturity is not there yet. Doubt it will be 2019. We need to squeeze more into chips before a regular-size glasses will be available with AR built in. Also personally I doubt it will be iPhone of AR. Too many companies are working on it and probably will come up to light at the similar time. It will be more like cruise control that so many car makers basically invented at the same time.
  - jeffgreco 8y ago
    I don't think we can consider Google's $1500 "explorer edition" Glass as a consumer product.
nicodjimenez 8y ago
Success in entertainment (and this includes social media startups) is really hard to replicate! I wonder why that is. It seems easier to consistently start enterprise software companies than it is to create new social media apps. Facebook's strategy of just buying what works and creating a media conglomerate for advertisers seems very smart to the casual observer.
- felipeerias 8y ago
  Maybe unconventional successes in entertainment tend to be hard to replicate because they require years gaining expertise and creating a strong product and that the ebbs and flows of public taste happen to favour that product when it comes out. If you're lucky, you might score a long shot at a moving target from very far away, but it will be hard to score a second one.
village-idiot 8y ago
When I was much younger, I thought that adults didn’t know how to use new tech, and that’s why they didn’t bother with new fangled tech like Facebook. Now that I’m closing in on my 30th birthday, I realize I had it all wrong. I can use snapchat, I just don’t understand why I would want to use it. I’m curious what Snapchat will do to try and entice people like me into using it. From where I sit, I’m having a very hard time imagining what they could possibly do.
- stevenjohns 8y ago
  Snapchat filled a niche that sat between directly messaging your friend/family group and putting something on display on Facebook. You could share random thoughts, things that happened in your day or interesting things you come across. It was walled version of Twitter with a focus on photo and video. What made it really interesting for me is that, because it uses your phone book to gather your contacts, you end up with a somewhat different circle to who you might have on Facebook. There were some people I hadn't spoken to for years, or people who were in my friends circle that I didn't talk to much, that became some of my most-interacted with people on Snapchat.
candiodari 8y ago
And once again you read "slowed down and ruined it" (aside from the language, which is too strong) ... people REALLY respond to latency. I wish Google would pay attention to this. Especially Gmail. It's just unacceptably slow and there is just no excuse.
sgt 8y ago
Snapchat may have lost a lot of users across the world, but it's still extremely popular in Norway. I'd say probably more than half the population aged 18-50 has it installed.
- sytelus 8y ago
  Any idea why?
  - mstg 8y ago
    From what I've seen, people are addicted to streaks.
    - sgt 8y ago
      If that's the case, the popularity won't necessarily translate into revenue.
ryanwhitney 8y ago
Snapchat’s biggest value to me is that they aren’t owned by facebook. So many jumped to Instagram and use it as a cross-platform messenger now as well—I don’t want to use Facebook (Instagram) messenger. I would love a more legit chat feature. It’s great that you can keep messages around for longer now. A safer UI that prevented accidentally adding the wrong friend to an image share would be awesome, as would as unsends. Unfortunate that their main revenue source seems to be really, really bad clickbait stories.
- Anaphylaxis 8y ago
  At least the memes are decent.
dhnsmakala 8y ago
I am just surprised that a publicly traded, multi-billion dollar company either did not think to A/B test major changes to the product or did not know how to properly conduct A/B testing. I assumed every one of the top apps/websites did this automatically, but I guess I was wrong.
- dannyw 8y ago
  They certainly did, but reports are that the CEO overruled the data and even multiple internal efforts against the change.
ma2rten 8y ago
Most of the incremental growth in our core markets like the US, UK, and France will have to come from older users who generate higher average revenue per user. Changing the design language of our product and improving our marketing and communications around Snapchat will help users understand our value Aging-up our community in core markets will also help the media, advertisers, and Wall Street understand Snapchat. To be honest, this seems like wishful thinking to me. It's going to very hard for them to regain momentum in their current demographic. It's going to be close to impossible to create a network effect outside of their current demographic.
lysp 8y ago
One of the reasons they had the mass exodus of the celebrity / influencer content makers was due to statistics. On "Instagram Insights" you can see: Interactions of the last 7 days, profile visits, email clicks, reach, impressions. Also in-depth demographics by your audience as well: city/country breakdown, age range, age range by gender, gender percentage, followers per hour and per day. And get similar statistics / demographics for all images and stories you post. If you were paying someone to promote content - these help justify payments made for content. Compare to snap with the stat of: "I have 10k follows" and that's it. Marketers want to know they are getting value for money, so need these to help justify paying someone for promotions/ads. eg. http://musemarketinggroup.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/insights-770x481.jpg http://musemarketinggroup.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/insi...
- krn 8y ago
  > Also in-depth demographics by your audience as well: city/country breakdown, age range, age range by gender, gender percentage [...] Does Snapchat actually collect all this information about its users? If yes, when it's such an unbelievable miss.
mvkel 8y ago
He blames “impatient strategic moves.” If they’re done hastily, are they even strategic?
alexrs95 8y ago
Oh, so now Evan Spiegel want to prioritize developing countries... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/17/snapchat-denies-claim-ceo-did-not-want-to-expand-into-poor-india https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/17/snapchat-...
- rchaud 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure he still doesn't. He just needs to boost the user numbers so the eventual takeover price tag isn't embarrassingly low.
Grue3 8y ago
Makes me laugh every time when people lionize some platform because "all the cool teens are on it!". It's obviously not a demographic you can profit from. And they will easily abandon your platform once they grow up.
mendeza 8y ago
Snapchat’s lens studio product is a definite category defining product. As an AR developer, it’s been soo much fun and enjoyable creating AR experiences, and its one of the first times I can make an experience and directly engage a large audience.

352 points by cpeterso 8y ago

The discover shit what made me delete Snapchat, keeps throwing annoying people at my face every time I open the app, why? it was a fun way to chat with friends and share short videos but no let fill it with booty shaking and nasty stuff and force you to watch it

Yhippa 8y ago

Why did they ignore Android usability and performance for so long? Also, I guess one of the cool things was the mystery meat UX but I wonder if that hurt them as they tried to garner broad appeal? Sometimes I see other people's Snaps and have no idea how they did certain things like effects, text, or interactive elements.

shanghaiaway 8y ago
Snapchat didn't have to be a fad. Spiegels incompetence as a CEO and as a product person killed the business.
nicoburns 8y ago
Yeah, I think instagram has eaten snapchats lunch just by having a much better (more performant) implementation. The snapchat app are so much more battery than anything else on my phone that I've actually completely uninstalled it, even though I quite liked using it.
addicted 8y ago
They explicitly focused on teens in rich countries with high end phones and high speed mobile connections. They wanted to target that “rich” niche.
AmericanChopper 8y ago
Market segmentation. Apple users are worth more money. Which kinda makes this pivot to the developing world a bit of head scratcher. High ARPC was one of the key differentiators they promoted back during their IPO.

shanghaiaway 8y ago

I read the whole memo, or tried to. Ridiculous. It means nothing at all. One OKR is "spread positivity". What does that even mean? How is it measurable? https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-company-memo-on-2019-strategic-goals-and-profitability https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-company-mem...

PhoenixReborn 8y ago
Indeed. Looking at their OKRs, the only one I can see turning it around for them is "Lead the Way in Augmented Reality". The others are fluff in wording and in punch, and I can't see them gaining ground against IG when IG executes on these ideas much better than Snap does.

ForHackernews 8y ago

Maybe this will be the beginning of the end for the social media bubble?

Kaveren 8y ago
Is there really a bubble? The players look fairly solidified to me. You have Facebook, which might not be as cool in all countries with younger users, and has had a lot of controversy surrounding fake news, election influence, and privacy, but it's doing well. You have Instagram, which is doing very well, was a great Facebook acquisition, helping their parent company even more. You have Twitter, which seems to be struggling by, and is still very relevant. Reddit is doing very well if you can even call it social meddia. Apps like Yik Yak, Whisper, Snapchat, and such all seem to have been going downhill or are gone for some time now. But I think the players we have are here to stay.
- mcintyre1994 8y ago
  Reddit is certainly trying to pivot toward social media, with probably the least enthusiasistic and most hostile user base for that change they could possibly have.
  - artursapek 8y ago
    The magic of reddit has always been in its detachment from real-world social structure. Reddit is successful because it grouped users by common interests and eliminated the burden of having your real identity associated with your online alter-ego. If they ruin that in an effort to sell more ads, it will be a sad loss.
  - dbbk 8y ago
    Reddit has always been social media, unless you're thinking of a different definition of it?
- askafriend 8y ago
  You've also got LinkedIn which is doing well by all accounts (even after the Microsoft exit). And Nextdoor which is much younger but cemented itself with steady growth and a unique network. I don't think any of these companies will have trouble making substantial money at scale for the foreseeable future. Snap's problems are unique to Snap.

georgespencer 8y ago

Here's coverage without an insanely user hostile "WE ARE PART OF OATH YOUR PRIVACY IS IMPORTANT (BUT IT'S DIFFICULT TO FIND SETTINGS TO DISABLE COOKIES)" lightbox which cannot be dismissed: https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-company-memo-on-2019-strategic-goals-and-profitability https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-company-mem...

semi-extrinsic 8y ago
It has autoplaying video with sound instead... Brave new world indeed.
- georgespencer 8y ago
  Ah apologies - I block that by default. I haven't yet found a way to block the stupid GDPR cookie pop ups.
  - driverdan 8y ago
    Firefox + NoScript works great.
  - tajen 8y ago
    In addition to the Do Not Track/DNT header, we’ll soon need a Do Not GDPR Me, Do Not Cookie-Warn Me, and No I Won’t Subscribe to Your Newsletter. I’d love the European Commission to make it forbidden to show popups on a website, to complete the irony.
  - Hoasi 8y ago
    Brave browser takes care of that too.
icebraining 8y ago
Alternatively, disable JS: the page looks perfect, just the article and its images. I have to congratulate the TC frontend devs.

fjsolwmv 8y ago

Did Snapchat really flop, or is the equity market undergoing a correction and return to sanity? Snapchat was a fun fad, not a sustainable enterprise. Everyone involved should have taken money off the table in the high times and realized the bubble component would pop.

askafriend 8y ago
You can call it a fad, but the truth is that they had and still have the opportunity to build a real business. The reality is that despite how seemingly old the internet is, we're still in the relatively early stages. There aren't that many companies globally building content systems at scale and working through the challenges of what that means - at scale. Those skills in an organization are extraordinary valuable as old media starts to crumble and information infrastructure on the internet becomes the new fundamental fabric of society - moreso than even today. I know that sounds a bit grandoise but that's the thinking behind the big bets behind companies like this. If Snap can just get some experienced, less impulsive leadership in place - they can still build an extremely valuable global media property. 180mm daily actives is no joke. As you can tell, I'm skeptical of Snap in it's current state of management but I'm bullish on social media overall.

thosakwe 8y ago

I used to be a heavy user of Snapchat, and fall into its dominant demographic - young* (edit, had forgotten this word) users. I remember buying stock in the company, and the same week, their big update rolling out, and quite literally burying my friends and their stories underneath the "overcrowded pile of clickbait" mentioned in the article. That, I believe, is where Snap really went wrong, and what drove 3 million users away from its platform. When you combine Instagram's own story implementation with the fact that Snap's focus seems to be mainly on Discover from this point, it seems unlikely to me that they'll ever regain the interest of people who abandoned it back in February. It will be interesting to see which changes they roll out in the months to come, but honestly, as long as the Discover page has even less meaningful content than a Taboola "Content you May Like" block, I can't foresee it being a real draw in for new users.

21 8y ago
I don't have many friends on Snapchat, but I follow a lot of celebrities. Literally the same week, 90% of them stopped posting, and it never recovered. Now it's a ghost town. People who followed friends got hit, people who follow celebrities got hit, I just don't get it what was on their mind.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jboy55 8y ago
  I would have to wonder how many true celebrities, people whose fame come from outside of social media, felt the same frustrations at not being able to see their friends feeds as other users.
sytelus 8y ago
Why they didn’t do extensive internal testing before rolling out such a huge UX changes? At least they should have rolled it out to smaller groups, measure metrics and expand group over time. The general rule in UX update is that larger the changes, longer it needs the A/B testing for impact on metrics. All botched UX updates have root cause in circumventing this rule by some passionate folks.

kposehn 8y ago

Snapchat has failed the test of feature vs. product. Everything that made Snapchat unique is something easily emulated in a myriad of other apps. When you strip away the interface, the only unique part of it was the network/aggregator-effect they have. However, they were much smaller than Instagram and as a result would be fighting an uphill battle with a product that already has the network and could easily duplicate the features.

askafriend 8y ago
I think of any social media company as an interface into a network. If the network isn't fundamentally the moat then that's a problem because the interface can often (but maybe not always) be a commodity. In the early stages, a small social media company may use its novel interface as the moat. Interface moats can be fragile but they buy the company some time to grow the network and gives the initial set of early adopters a reason to join. However at maturity, the interface alone can't continue to be the only thing that can defend or provide a moat for a business. The problem with Snap (as you pointed out) is that the network characteristics are similar to Facebook's or Instagram's....aka friends and family....aka people in your phone contacts. Facebook's fundamental value is that they were one of the first ones to capture the graph that already existed in your phone and brought it online at scale. However, the actual network they built isn't as novel or as difficult to build as something like Twitter which is a graph that existed nowhere else before. LinkedIn is similar to Facebook in that the business contacts probably already existed in your phone or on a bunch of business cards. But because we don't want our professional lives and our personal lives to share the same spaces, LinkedIn was able to capture the professional opportunity by bringing business contacts online. What does this all have to do with Snap? Well Snap has the unfortunate position of having similar network characteristics to Facebook's while also being in a similar social space albeit heavily skewed younger (I consider Instagram to be in a roughly similar social space). Snap probably felt like the demographic skew alone would be enough to balance out this weak position but I suspect they're finding out quickly that it is not since Instagram is proving to be a thriving space for young people too. On the other hand, networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Nextdoor are all either unique networks underneath the primary interface or they share different social spaces that people usually don't want mixed. Anyone can make an interface but it's incredibly hard to grow a network in a particular social space. The latter almost always makes for a stronger moat. Snap needs to figure out how to make progress on the latter because I think many of their large problems stem from not having enough of a moat at the network level.

cpitman 8y ago

Coming off of the recent SEC case against Elon Musk, does anyone know how they look at leaks from public companies, especially high impact ones like this? Are there any examples of SEC action in the past?

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
The SEC allows companies to make corporate announcements through social media. Tweets of a public company’s CEO are thus corporate announcements. Leaks are reported on by third parties, and thus don’t fall under the same rules. The leaker might get in trouble for Reg FD violations, or for violating an NDA, but given the reduced risk of damage (particularly when the leaked information is not fabricated), it’s been a low enforcement priority.
aetherson 8y ago
I don't think that there's any kind of SEC impact to memos that talk about strategy and product goals. It's different if you offer material previously non-public finding info, as Musk did.

Kaveren 8y ago

I don't use Snapchat, but now I understand why the redesign I saw so much hate on was pushed into production. I can't speak to the specifics of what changed, but I don't see why you wouldn't even A/B test such a massive change to your service. Instagram Stories seem like they might've had a big impact on the popularity of the app as well.

iamleppert 8y ago

They had a working thing and then ruined it. I’m not sure how they managed to do that with a product change. Didn’t they have a way to release changes and measure impact before just forcing it on their entire user base? Once a company gets to this level, they need to recognize the role that luck played into their original product and design. They hit a resonance with people, and it was probably more luck and timing than anything else. Changes to that core product need to be treated as an experiment and conducted as such. Show some discipline. You can still innovate but those ideas should be made to stand on their own, grow on their own. Just because you have control over a platform with millions of users and can make changes doesn’t automatically mean you can do no wrong at this point. It just means you will have more time and resources before those mistakes take you out of the game completely. He should be punished for his mistakes by the board installing some experienced adult supervision for a while until he shows he can fix his current mess (reverse negative growth) and innovate in at least an additional major product category tangential to Snap. If he can’t do that in the next 24 months, he should step down for the good of the company.

ethbro 8y ago
I think it's unsurprising when founders of unicorns eschew A/B testing in favor of vision. Admitting part of their success was luck is tantamount to admitting "I went from nothing to a billionaire because the dice came up right." I don't know many people who would be comfortable truly accepting that. And even fewer who could do so AND be the type of driven person necessary. All while everyone around you is looking to you for answers.
- ljm 8y ago
  Purely anecdotally, the one place I worked at that embraced A/B testing went to such an extreme that it stifled the vision. It became so risk averse that nothing was really happening, yet at the same time the business was not in the place to sustain growth or even profit that way. This is because the introduction of such a data driven mentality meant the only people empowered to suggest decisions or experiments or approve the work were all in marketing. Because they were basically deciding what workload they wanted and of course you won’t put more on your plate if you don’t have to. This isn’t to say it’s about data vs. vision. The original success is usually created in large part due to a healthy collaboration between the visionaries, the engineers, and whoever else is in the mix. Once you take one part of the team out of the equation and tend too heavily towards a particular bias then you might well have lost the secret to the initial success.

endlessvoid94 8y ago

They're fucked.

fermienrico 8y ago
Please post something useful, insightful or worthy of discussion. Otherwise, don't post at all. Thank you.
- vntok 8y ago
  Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
  - fermienrico 8y ago
    Thanks, I didn’t realize I can flag it. I shall do that going forward.

pavlov 8y ago

”Adults, not teens. Messaging, not Stories. Developing markets, not the U.S.” So... Snap basically wants to be Facebook? Adults, messaging, developing world — Facebook is already enormously entrenched in the overlap of those markets thanks to Messenger and WhatsApp. FB has also shown the ability to clone Snap’s product innovations. I have a feeling 2019 is the year when Snap is acquired. The market cap is already below $10 billion.

Theodores 8y ago
The USP of Snapchat was that parents could not go through past messages as these would get deleted once read. So, if you had planned a night out on the town doing silly things you could still pretend to the parents that you would being having a sleep over at a best friend's house. Even if they went through the phone with a fine toothcomb the parents would not find evidence of plans for wrong-doing. Facebook is not about regularly messaging your best friends, it is about messaging/stalking people you knew from school onwards up to now, including workmates, parents and other people you don't message important things to, such as plans for tonight. Snap are pretending here that their 'besties' market isn't already consumed by WhatsApp!, which it is, so Facebook have already eaten their lunch there. They don't actually acknowledge their 'secret sauce' in this memo, which was the instantly deleting messages that appeal to teens.
- frankydp 8y ago
  I also viewed Snap as an platform built on a single missing SMS feature, temporal messages. They have added a bunch of other stuff, but that single feature was always the adoption driver, and eventually users figured out screenshots trump deletion. I also thought that the other features were in direct conflict with that adoption driver, as in actively providing negative user incentives for continued use.
abakker 8y ago
Who would be the buyer, though? Microsoft? Alibaba? I can't see many acquirers wanting to get into the competitions that snapchat has gotten themselves into.

throwaway901234 8y ago

A lot of Bay Area companies subscribe to the "make the world a better place" mantra. To me, the original meaning was to create (technology?) products that make things possible or just easier. However, that's not Silicon Valley's take. People take it as a green light to take their morals (what they think is "good" - including their political views), and then, through their employer's product, impose those morals onto the user base. Some are fairly benign. "Positivity is good", albeit a simplistic view of the world, isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. The standard modern approach of "create a metric, optimize" comes into play. Might result in things like highlighting "positive" content and downplaying "negative" content. Some are slightly more questionable. Every SV app (including those that are absolutely not related in any way) is trying to get people to vote. So, in a "vacuum", voting is good. However, CA is left-leaning - so, why is this only a thing during Trump and wasn't done during Obama? The usage demographics of these apps are also left-leaning - these calls to action for voting are affecting the distribution of voters - if they truly wanted an impartial result, they should show the "vote" banner to a uniform distribution of people (through subsampling). I'm looking at Reddit and Discord here.

addicted 8y ago
GOTV in apps was fairly common during the Obama years as well. In a democracy there is only one correct side in the “get more people to vote” and “get less people to vote” argument. The fact that some think getting more people to vote is a partisan endeavor says more about the anti democratic leanings of one side of the partisan divide than anything else. (Edited)
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  It is partisan because because people’s votes are predictable. An armed forces GOTV is going to benefit one side, an African American GOTV is going to benefit the other. Who a GOTV targets shows which side they are on.
Retra 8y ago
What's next? Politicians informing people of their stances will now be seen as "influencing the outcome of elections"; an obviously unreasonable partisan tactic. If you tell someone what they should do -- or now even ask them to make their own decisions -- you're an enemy of democracy, I suppose. Funneling millions anonymously into super-PAC campaigns is ok, but telling people to vote... that's too much politics for a company. Critical thinking also means analyzing your own biases, not just those of others.

anilshanbhag 8y ago

Lost in all this is an important distinction that Snapchat wanted to make: they wanted to separate friends from influencers / celebrities / media. It was a good change. Another important thing Snapchat does is it doesn't show likes / followers publicly - when the whole world is chasing these numbers Snapchat has taken stance against it. The general philosophy they follow makes me think this is short term pain and the company will do fine in the long run.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
solarkraft 8y ago
It was a terrible change. People (most heavily: kids) like to consider celebrities their friends. People loved the close, barely filtered connection Snapchat gave them.
jpatokal 8y ago
Why did Snapchat feel so strongly that it was necessary to separate them? Neither Instagram nor Twitter separate friends from influencers/celebrities/media, and that seems to work fine.
- dbbk 8y ago
  My understanding is that it was a philosophical standpoint Evan took, not 'Snapchat' as a whole necessarily.
dannyw 8y ago
I'd love to hear why you think that separating friends from influencers, celebrity, or media is a good change. The last element I get somewhat, but I don't think anyone has a conceptual issue identifying who is a fried and who is an influencer, and being able to see stories with minimal friction was a major draw for me.
- sytelus 8y ago
  I follow few friends and non-friends on FB and they are very distinct entities. The non-friends I follow are because of some common interest like a research field or outdoor sport. I would be happy to see weekend yard work photos from my friend but I wouldn’t care so much of that from non-friends. The intent of why I follow these two classes is very different. However Snapchat crowd might be different as I understand. Young folks would tend to consider both classes as same.

radiantswirl 8y ago

It disgusts me how Spiegel uses the royal "We" throughout this memo to distract from the fact that he himself was the (sole?) driving force behind the terrible decisions he now regrets. Own your shit Spiegel, using the royal "we" to deflect blame from your own bad decisions does not show maturity, it shows the opposite. Miranda Kerr is swiping through her Raya app looking for a dalliance on the side because "for some reason Evan just isn't giving her what she needs anymore" in 3...2...1......

gaius 8y ago

Snapchat is still bleeding money, losing $353 million last quarter. I literally do not understand what they can be spending that much money on, can anyone clue me in? It can't be on infra and bandwidth.

joubert 8y ago
For the year ending 12/31/2017 it looks like $1.5 billion in R&D and $2 billion in sales, general, and admin expenses. https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/snap/financials?query=income-statement https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/snap/financials?query=income-s... Q1 2018 financials here: https://investor.snap.com/news-releases/2018/05-01-2018-211516272 https://investor.snap.com/news-releases/2018/05-01-2018-2115...
addicted 8y ago
For one thing, they are contractually obligated to pay Google and Amazon at least $600mm per year for the next few years. So that’s $150mm per quarter, as a minimum (if their usage doesn’t meet that amount they have to pay the difference). They are paying something like $200mm on R&D/quarter, and over $100mm on advertising and administrative each. Their “cost of revenues” (I’m not exactly sure what this means for them...I wonder if it is discounts offered to advertisers) is another $190mm. So a few hundred million here and a few hundred million there adds up to a $350mm quarterly loss. What’s interesting is their R&D expenses have dropped 20% from the year ago quarter, while their sales and marketing have increased substantially. That does not bode well for the future either in my opinion (although it’s easily arguable that even $200mm per quarter on R&D seems excesssive for Snap). Edit: I quickly compared them to Twitter, which isn’t known as the most leanest of run companies in the first place, but Twitter’s R&D costs are $139mm/quarter compared to over $200mm for SNAP. Their administraative costs are $74mm/quarter, compared to over $100mm for SNAP. How is SNAP spending so much more money than Twitter, and clearly producing a fraction of the output?

rhizome 8y ago

15 pages? It's not a leak if it's meant to get out, and 15 pages means it was meant to get out.

logicallee 8y ago

>The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate,” Spiegel stresses throughout the memo regarding “Project Cheetah.” Hmmmmmmmmmm. The Google Mail redesign comes to mind. Gmail has 1.4 billion users. (April 2018 figure, Gmail's Wikipedia page.) Google management, if you're listening: the writing is on the wall. You have it there black and white: "The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest" In this comment I outline some reach goals for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17873576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17873576 (That comment is written in a wishful style, what I know you can do and what I imagine you can do.) You can do it! Just hire the best. Put the best on that team. 1.2 billion users mean you can afford it. You can do it. Do it. You can do it. I believe in you with all my heart.

willio58 8y ago

As a college student who’s only social media comes through Snapchat, I’m glad that they will be making changes. The redesign doesn’t make much sense and just made things more confusing if anything. I have 12+ friends in a group which we use to coordinate hanging out and to generally chat about things we find interesting. I haven’t used the stories functionality in over a year. I really think the move to focusing on chat is the way to go, even though there’s a lot of competition there. I started on Facebook at 12 years old when it first became popular, I’ve gone through many platforms but dropped them all and I’ve been using only Snapchat for over 4 years now and it seems to have the perfect level of privacy. It also doesn’t feed as much into the whole “look at how awesome my life is compared to yours” trap of facebookish platforms, at least the way my friends use it.

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
Just curious (I don't use Snapchat as I'm a fair bit older then the target demographic), why do you use it to chat rather than an actual IM? Eg Telegram or Discord or Wire.
- n767 8y ago
  I'm not OP but I use Snapchat a lot to chat. I like that the messages are not saved, it feels more natural for me as in I don't have to "think" too much about what I write, just as talking. This way it feels less staged, you can compare it to photos on insta vs photos on snap (likes and permanent vs none of that). With text it's obviously to a lesser extend but still. No one can go through years of messages and see what i said back then.

jorblumesea 8y ago

I'm not sure they can make a comeback, Instagram ripped off all the good parts and executed on their vision better. Adding all of the celebrity ads and discover feature was a huge mistake, all users wanted to do was communicate with their friends.

14 8y ago

They forced me off their platform. I have an older iPhone 4s and can not update past ios 9.3.5. Snapchat eventually forced an update and that required me having the latest ios which I could not even do since Apple stopped supporting this device years ago despite it still being a pretty good phone.

mindgam3 8y ago

Give credit where credit is due. Spiegel is digging deep, showing humility, and asking the right questions after Snap has been flailing for a long time. The crux of the issue is that they haven't launched anything fundamentally innovative and game-changing since the original Snapchat, which went insanely viral in the teen demographic. In this sense they are following a similar path as Bebo, where I worked before they were acquired by AOL. Launch viral product to teens, blow up huge, score huge business deals, and then growth stagnates because it turns out the original vision only encompassed a product, not an entire platform. Bebo ended up selling to AOL right before it became clear the entire business model was failing thanks to Facebook. I saw a comment below about 2019 being the year that Snap is acquired. I could very much see that happening. The only thing that would turn things around is if Spiegel can pull another rabbit out of his hat and launch a category-defining product somewhere. Augmented Reality could be where they do it. They did fail miserably with Spectacles, their first take on smartglasses, but again, give credit to them for having the balls to invest in hardware and ship a product. That said, the fact that they shipped a v2 of Spectacles that didn't fix any of the core problems with the original isn't a good sign. Still, augmented reality is going to be the future of computing when it merges with consumer wearables. It's early days in this market. Every Big Tech company is racing to launch the iPhone of smartglasses. Snap has managed to be the first to launch consumer glasses with a camera. If they can pull their sh*t together and ship something that is actually useful and doesn't look ridiculous, they could still emerge as a dominant player.

joering2 8y ago
Snap was first? We forgetting Google Glasses I guess. Google tried but clearly market maturity is not there yet. Doubt it will be 2019. We need to squeeze more into chips before a regular-size glasses will be available with AR built in. Also personally I doubt it will be iPhone of AR. Too many companies are working on it and probably will come up to light at the similar time. It will be more like cruise control that so many car makers basically invented at the same time.
- jeffgreco 8y ago
  I don't think we can consider Google's $1500 "explorer edition" Glass as a consumer product.

nicodjimenez 8y ago

Success in entertainment (and this includes social media startups) is really hard to replicate! I wonder why that is. It seems easier to consistently start enterprise software companies than it is to create new social media apps. Facebook's strategy of just buying what works and creating a media conglomerate for advertisers seems very smart to the casual observer.

felipeerias 8y ago
Maybe unconventional successes in entertainment tend to be hard to replicate because they require years gaining expertise and creating a strong product and that the ebbs and flows of public taste happen to favour that product when it comes out. If you're lucky, you might score a long shot at a moving target from very far away, but it will be hard to score a second one.

village-idiot 8y ago

When I was much younger, I thought that adults didn’t know how to use new tech, and that’s why they didn’t bother with new fangled tech like Facebook. Now that I’m closing in on my 30th birthday, I realize I had it all wrong. I can use snapchat, I just don’t understand why I would want to use it. I’m curious what Snapchat will do to try and entice people like me into using it. From where I sit, I’m having a very hard time imagining what they could possibly do.

stevenjohns 8y ago
Snapchat filled a niche that sat between directly messaging your friend/family group and putting something on display on Facebook. You could share random thoughts, things that happened in your day or interesting things you come across. It was walled version of Twitter with a focus on photo and video. What made it really interesting for me is that, because it uses your phone book to gather your contacts, you end up with a somewhat different circle to who you might have on Facebook. There were some people I hadn't spoken to for years, or people who were in my friends circle that I didn't talk to much, that became some of my most-interacted with people on Snapchat.

candiodari 8y ago

And once again you read "slowed down and ruined it" (aside from the language, which is too strong) ... people REALLY respond to latency. I wish Google would pay attention to this. Especially Gmail. It's just unacceptably slow and there is just no excuse.

sgt 8y ago

Snapchat may have lost a lot of users across the world, but it's still extremely popular in Norway. I'd say probably more than half the population aged 18-50 has it installed.

sytelus 8y ago
Any idea why?
- mstg 8y ago
  From what I've seen, people are addicted to streaks.
  - sgt 8y ago
    If that's the case, the popularity won't necessarily translate into revenue.

ryanwhitney 8y ago

Snapchat’s biggest value to me is that they aren’t owned by facebook. So many jumped to Instagram and use it as a cross-platform messenger now as well—I don’t want to use Facebook (Instagram) messenger. I would love a more legit chat feature. It’s great that you can keep messages around for longer now. A safer UI that prevented accidentally adding the wrong friend to an image share would be awesome, as would as unsends. Unfortunate that their main revenue source seems to be really, really bad clickbait stories.

Anaphylaxis 8y ago
At least the memes are decent.

dhnsmakala 8y ago

I am just surprised that a publicly traded, multi-billion dollar company either did not think to A/B test major changes to the product or did not know how to properly conduct A/B testing. I assumed every one of the top apps/websites did this automatically, but I guess I was wrong.

dannyw 8y ago
They certainly did, but reports are that the CEO overruled the data and even multiple internal efforts against the change.

ma2rten 8y ago

Most of the incremental growth in our core markets like the US, UK, and France will have to come from older users who generate higher average revenue per user. Changing the design language of our product and improving our marketing and communications around Snapchat will help users understand our value Aging-up our community in core markets will also help the media, advertisers, and Wall Street understand Snapchat. To be honest, this seems like wishful thinking to me. It's going to very hard for them to regain momentum in their current demographic. It's going to be close to impossible to create a network effect outside of their current demographic.

lysp 8y ago

One of the reasons they had the mass exodus of the celebrity / influencer content makers was due to statistics. On "Instagram Insights" you can see: Interactions of the last 7 days, profile visits, email clicks, reach, impressions. Also in-depth demographics by your audience as well: city/country breakdown, age range, age range by gender, gender percentage, followers per hour and per day. And get similar statistics / demographics for all images and stories you post. If you were paying someone to promote content - these help justify payments made for content. Compare to snap with the stat of: "I have 10k follows" and that's it. Marketers want to know they are getting value for money, so need these to help justify paying someone for promotions/ads. eg. http://musemarketinggroup.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/insights-770x481.jpg http://musemarketinggroup.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/insi...

krn 8y ago
> Also in-depth demographics by your audience as well: city/country breakdown, age range, age range by gender, gender percentage [...] Does Snapchat actually collect all this information about its users? If yes, when it's such an unbelievable miss.

mvkel 8y ago

He blames “impatient strategic moves.” If they’re done hastily, are they even strategic?

alexrs95 8y ago

Oh, so now Evan Spiegel want to prioritize developing countries... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/17/snapchat-denies-claim-ceo-did-not-want-to-expand-into-poor-india https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/17/snapchat-...

rchaud 8y ago
I'm pretty sure he still doesn't. He just needs to boost the user numbers so the eventual takeover price tag isn't embarrassingly low.

Grue3 8y ago

Makes me laugh every time when people lionize some platform because "all the cool teens are on it!". It's obviously not a demographic you can profit from. And they will easily abandon your platform once they grow up.

mendeza 8y ago

Snapchat’s lens studio product is a definite category defining product. As an AR developer, it’s been soo much fun and enjoyable creating AR experiences, and its one of the first times I can make an experience and directly engage a large audience.