Snapchat has become one of the world‘s most beloved and used social media platforms, but its origins lie in a Stanford dorm room back in 2011. Three students, Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown imagined a new way for people to communicate visually – and the rest is history.
In this deep dive into Snapchat‘s history, we‘ll cover all the key events that catapulted it to global fame and a $100 billion valuation. From the initial viral growth at US colleges through periods of controversy, constant product innovation and rebranding as Snap Inc, it‘s been 10 rollercoaster years for the photo sharing app.
Founding Snapchat: The Stanford Genesis Story
Our story begins in the spring of 2011 at Stanford University, where two Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, lived just a few doors down from each other in the dorms.
Spiegel, a 21-year-old junior, met senior Reggie Brown at a design class where they bonded over wanting to start a business. Brown came up with the core conceit of an app where photo messages would disappear after being viewed.
Excited by the idea, Spiegel brought Murphy, an expert coder, on board to build out their vision. The app would let people share moments in a casual, temporary way akin to real-life face-to-face conversations.
After just two weeks of intense work, the very first version of the app, named Picaboo, was finished in July 2011. It only worked on iOS at this stage, allowing users to send photo snaps which would self-delete after 10 seconds.
The reaction from their frat brothers who beta tested Picaboo was hugely positive. After some rebranding to the catchier name of Snapchat, the app debuted on the iOS App Store in September 2011. Immediately it started to spread like wildfire…
Viral Growth Across US Campuses
Thanks to its viral social nature, word-of-mouth appeal and exclusivity on iOS, Snapchat engulfed college campuses within months. By the end of 2012, users were sharing 50 million snaps per day. New Android and Windows Phone apps also brought more users flooding in.
Key to its addictive appeal were core features that made the experience inherently different from existing social media:
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Ephemerality: Unlike platforms like Facebook where content stuck around forever, Snaps gave a fleeting glimpse before vanishing permanently. It encouraged sharing spontaneous, funny or ugly images that you wouldn’t post publicly on a “permanent record”.
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Privacy: With deletion built-in and no public sharing, Snaps felt private and contained compared to other networks. You also had to know someone’s username to add them.
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Delight: Fun AR filters, lenses and stickers added an element of amusement and creativity to messaging. Doodling on images or making silly faces became a daily pastime for Snapchatters.
As the userbase swelled, Snapchat also dealt with some growing pains during 2013. Co-founder Reggie Brown was shoved out of the company he’d helped start amidst arguments over equity splits.
Brown sued Murphy and Spiegel for his share. They would go on to settle a few years later for $157.5 million, cementing Spiegel and Murphy as the duo in control of Snapchat from then on.
Rapid Product Innovation
Despite this legal headache, Snapchat accelerated its product innovation throughout 2013. They introduced ephemeral Stories – a string of Snaps displayed chronologically for 24 hours. This became the app’s most popular and copied feature, cementing Snapchat as the place for photo and video sharing amongst friends.
Other key additions included:
- Chat: Built-in messaging functionality so friends could chat directly within Snapchat.
- Snapcash: A peer-to-peer payments platform linked to bank accounts.
- Discover: Content from media partners like BuzzFeed and Cosmopolitan that refreshed daily.
- Memories: Cloud storage space for saving certain photos instead of losing them.
- Lenses: Playful selfie filters powered by cutting-edge AR tech. Could turn you into a dog or flower crown princess!
Buoyed by relentless product focus, over 100 million people used Snapchat by 2014. And despite approaches from heavyweights like Facebook for a $3 billion acquisition, Spiegel and Murphy remained determined to take Snapchat all the way themselves…
From Sexting Reputation to Advertising Giant
During its early years, Snapchat couldn’t seem to shake associations with sexting that put off advertisers. But 2015 marked a pivotal shift, with Snapchat forging a new reputation built on visual communication and announcing plans for its own ad platform.
The age of its power users – predominantly affluent teens and 20-somethings – were also hugely attractive to brands hungry for millennial marketing opportunities. By the end of 2015, Snapchat ads were slotted between Stories and the money began rolling in.
Within a year, Snapchat rocketed to over 10 billion daily video views with the average user spending 30 minutes per day in-app. It was official – they had built one of the most engaging social media products ever that kept even notoriously short attention spans glued to their phones.
Major milestones over the next few years included:
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Launching Snap ads in 2015: 10 second skippable video ads targeted to users based on their behavior.
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Hitting $1 billion revenue run rate in Q4, 2016 – a mere 5 years since founding! Their ads operation was crushing it thanks to an enviable youth audience.
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150 million global daily active users by 2016. For context it took Twitter 4x longer reach that number after being founded.
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Rebranding parent company to Snap Inc. in 2016, signaling ambitions to become “a camera company” that made more than just an app. More on this pivot shortly!
Spectacles & The Pivot To Snap Inc.
In September 2016, Snapchat incorporated itself into Snap Inc. This move crystalized Spiegel‘s view to transform Snap into "a camera company" focused on next-gen hardware, software and services premised on visual communication.
To bring this vision into reality, Snap Inc. secretly built its first piece of hardware called Spectacles. These were trendy sunglasses outfitted with a camera to directly capture Snaps. It gave hands-free photos rather than using your phone to take point-of-view shots.
In late 2016, Snapchat opened funky pop-up vending machines for people to buy Spectacles. They caused a viral craze with huge lines forming as people got their first taste of image-capturing wearables.
Although Spectacles weren‘t a resounding success, Snap was clearly gearing itself for a future blending apps, glasses, drones and other camera-driven gadgets.
"We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate,” said CEO Evan Spiegel. “We contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together".
This has been their North Star ever since Spectacles – backing up camera innovation with world-class software, distribution platforms and social experiences.
The Snapchat IPO Bonanza
After 6 years of staggering user growth, Snap Inc. was ready to IPO. They listed publicly on March 2nd, 2017 at $17 per share, giving the company an initial valuation of $24 billion.
Demand to own shares was feverish as Snap opened trading up over $22. It was the hottest tech offering since Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The successful IPO made Snapchat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy multi-billionaires with net worths ballooning up to $4 billion a piece. They personally pocketed around $500 million each from selling shares.
Snap Inc. had become the bellwether company for the new paradigm of internet-connected cameras. And the cash influx allowed them to double down on this vision…
Post-IPO Acquisitions & Innovation
Flush with new capital, Snap Inc. went on an acquisition spree to accelerate innovation across software, content and hardware:
Some of their biggest buys included:
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Zenly (2017) – Location-sharing app became the backbone of Snap Map which lets you see friends‘ locations.
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Placed (2017) – Provided ad analytics tied offline store/mall visits to Snapchat data.
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Cimagine (2017) – Israeli AR startup powered more Snapchat Lenses which warp faces in real-time.
Blending these new capabilities with homegrown engineering, Snapchat kept expanding what you could do inside the app:
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Snap Map (2017) – Opt-in to share your location with friends via an animated map. Meet up IRL!
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Group Video Chat (2018) – Built in video calls for up to 16 friends.
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Snap Games (2019) – Play lightweight social games against friends a la Words With Friends.
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Spotlight (2020) – TikTok-esque feed of best submitted short videos with cash rewards for top clips.
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Director Mode (2021) – Automatically stitch together Snaps from different points of view to make a video collage.
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AR Lenses – Continued advancements in augmented reality selfie effects. Even let developers create their own.
Relentless innovation and leveraging user data for laser-targeted ads led to massive revenue growth in the years following IPO. After only $404 million in sales for 2017, four years later Snap hit over $4 billion annual revenue in 2021. 90% of this revenue came from advertising.
With healthy revenue amplifying their capabilities, the outlook remains sunny for Snap – even bucking a souring macro environment dragging on other digital ads players in 2022.
The Power of Snapchat by the Numbers
Over a decade after launch, where does Snapchat now stand in the social media echelon? They’ve cemented a beloved standing in Gen Z culture, evolving features at breakneck clip and fending off rising competition.
Here’s a snapshot of statistics for the platform:
- Daily Active Users hit 363 million by Q4 2021 – larger than Twitter and growing faster than Instagram
- Over 5 billion Snaps created every day
- 60% of users create content daily
- 500 million monthly global users on Snap Map location sharing
- Average user spends 30+ minutes per day on Snapchat
- 90% of Snap Ads are skippable videos up to 3 minutes long
- 77% of weekly users are under 35 years old
For marketers, Snapchat’s young user base is a uniquely valuable but elusive demographic on more traditional networks like Facebook. They hold big spending power and are of prime interest for brands across retail, entertainment, cosmetics, travel and alcohol.
The native vertical video ads that Snap pioneered also lend themselves perfectly to mobile devices – a format now widely replicated.
And as augmented reality keeps improving in capability and accessibility each year, Snap’s heavy investment in their camera and Lenses put them years ahead of competitors when it comes to experimenting with new AR formats.
Controversies and Growing Pains
Despite staggering growth and popularity amongst Generation Z users, Snapchat‘s rise hasn‘t been without speedbumps.
Most prominently was a data privacy scandal in 2014. Hackers exploited a vulnerability that leaked 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers to the public internet. This led to an FTC charge that Snapchat had deceived users over promises of vanishing messages and secured data.
As part of settlement, Snap had to commit to 20 years of US privacy monitoring and overhaul security practices. With data protection tightly locked down, there have been no major incidents since.
A second controversy came in 2018 when Snapchat rolled out a major app redesign that was terribly received by its community. Core social features were moved and shuffled in ways that frustrated users. The revamp led to a petition signed by over 1.2 million people to revert changes!
In response, Snap worked closely with top creators and adopted user suggestions to smooth over pain points in the redesign. Tweaks helped mollify frustration while modernizing navigation.
Despite these dust-ups over privacy and product misfires, Snapchat has maintained an overall positive brand affinity – especially with the coveted youth demographic who value its spontaneity, creativity and authenticity.
The Future of Snap Inc.
As Snap Inc. passes the decade mark as a breakout startup, where are they headed next amidst stiff competition from Chinese upstart TikTok and Facebook‘s ever-growing empire?
CEO Evan Spiegel believes Snapchat is uniquely positioned for an augmented reality future he calls the “the camera age” where technology will overlay digital experiences onto the physical world.
Snap will continue pouring tremendous resources into AR hardware like Spectacles glasses and software like Lenses that trigger effects based on what your camera sees. As AR impacts more of how we shop, learn, game and consume media over the next 5-10 years, Snap aims to power these experiences with sticky social apps.
They’re also focused on further monetizing their remarkably engaged Gen Z user base, launching more gaming experiences, and spreading Snapchat overseas where the app has plenty of headroom to grow in regions like India.
And while mimicking features released by competitors has led some to call Snapchat an “Instagram copycat”, the company’s track record of innovation has arguably changed the face of social media and shaped wider adoption of video messaging, stories and AR effects across apps.
Thanks the creative bravery in their DNA, you can count on this Snap team to continue dreaming up fresh forms of visual communication that set the pace for the industry. They’ve earned the benefit of the doubt!
Final Thoughts
In the 10 years since launch, Snapchat has embodied tremendous pace of adaptation. They’ve aggressively innovated features while maturing their business model to reward early faith from users and shareholders.
Yes, they’ll continue facing questions over platform competition, user growth and spikes in market volatility.
But with history as prelude, their right mix of calculated risk-taking, responding to user feedback and smart pivots gives me confidence in Snap Inc.’s trajectory for the long-term. Whether revolutionizing social video, cameras or a new medium altogether they sit at the frontier exploring what comes next.
And for those curious where a startup idea might lead 10 years down the line, Snapchat remains one of Silicon Valley’s greatest modern case studies. Stay tuned for the next era!
