Evan Spiegel
Co-founder, CEO
Product design at Stanford. Pitched disappearing photos as a class project and never let it go.
snapchat
Send a photo. Ten seconds later, it's gone.
Series A · February 2013
10 golden hour, no filter
New Snap from Bobby
Opened 2s ago
Problem
Every photo you post goes on your permanent record.
- TaggedFriends post the bad angle and your name goes on it.
- WatchedParents, teachers and future bosses can scroll back years.
- PerformedSo every post is a perfect shot, and the real moments stay unsent.
Photos of youTagged by 61 friends
Mom who is this boy??
- Visible to
- Everyone
- Kept for
- Forever
The insight
A photo you can't keep is a photo you'll actually send.
Posting
- Who sees it
- Everyone you know
- How long
- Forever
- How you look
- Perfect
- Keeping score
- Likes and comments
Snapping
- Who sees it
- The friends you pick
- How long
- Up to 10 seconds
- How you look
- However you look
- Keeping score
- Nobody
Try it
You get ten seconds with this snap. Then it's gone for good.
One new snap from Bobby. Tap it to open. Open. 7 seconds left, and no way to save it. Gone. No replay, no camera roll, nothing to scroll back to.
Take a screenshot and the sender finds out.
Snaps
MayaOpened · 2h
SamOpened · 5h
JordanChat · 1d
Gone.
Objections
Grown-ups guessed what it was for. Teenagers already knew.
Evan pitched disappearing photos as a product design project. Classmates said it was a bad idea.
WrongHeadline after headline asked whether it was just a sexting app.
WrongHis teenage daughter said Snapchat was one of the three most popular apps with her friends, next to Instagram and Angry Birds.
RightTraction
Snaps a day went from about 2 million to 60 million in nine months.
February 2013
60M
Snaps a day
About 700 a second, and 5 billion sent so far.
Engagement
Half the people who install it use it every day.
Spring 2012, when the seed investors looked under the hood.
1 in 2installs open it daily
- ~180Kinstalls
- ~90Kuse it every day
- 6×opens a day, per user
- 50%still active after 90 days
Competition
Facebook copied us in December. A week later we outranked the copy.
Their clone gave the idea free advertising. People went looking for the original.
Top free iPhone apps
Why a company
Teenagers are turning the camera into the way they talk.
- Photo + videoVideo snaps shipped in December
- iPhone + AndroidAndroid since October
- 5 billionSnaps sent so far
No revenue yet. The habit comes first, the business follows.
- math class rn
- same
- watch the dog
- STOP
Team
Ten people run 60 million snaps a day.
Bobby Murphy
Co-founder, CTO
Math and computational science at Stanford. Built the app, and paid its first server bills from his day job.
Eight more
The rest of the crew
Five of them joined in the last few months. This round pays for the next hires.
The ask
We're raising $13.5 million to keep up with 60 million snaps a day.
How it went: Benchmark's Mitch Lasky led the round in February 2013, at a reported $60M to $70M valuation.
Series A
$13.5M
PeopleEngineers to grow a team of ten
ServersTens of millions of snaps a day, every day
Raised so far$485K seed, Lightspeed, April 2012
Nine months later
Facebook slid in with about $3 billion. Snapchat said no.
- June 2013Series B values it at about $800 million
- October 2013Stories launch, snaps that last 24 hours
- November 2013400 million snaps a day
FacebookOpened · declined
$3,000,000,000
All cash, as reported
No.