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Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

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Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#121

Post by vonklaus »

gonehome wrote: post #106
vonklaus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I outlined my thoughts, a large social network would have to do it. linkedin, google, twitter, microsoft or facebook. LinkedIn, twitter, facebook being the most profitable. Maybe apple, for the security, weird FBI hacking thing although their software has gone down hill. I digress, what was the Facebook snapchat clone? I haven't heard of a large scale effort to clone snapchat yet. If I were to build a comparable univ…

It was called FB Poke and was built in 12 days after Zuckerberg flew out to talk to Evan and Evan turned his offer down. When it launched it was basically better than snapchat in every category, but people didn't switch to it. Then Evan responded by copying Apple and saying 'Welcome Facebook, Seriously'. On an unrelated meta note I found this annoying because it originally came from people building personal computers…

interesting. going to dig up the advert. maybe they have a long play here. thanks.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#122

Post by askldfhjkasfhd »

vonklaus wrote: post #101
alaskamiller wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those grafs and you still can't figure it out. Say you have a Snapchat account and follow 25 of your friends. Each of them are active and contribute 30 second snap stories maybe 4 times a day. That means it's 50 minutes of footage. A day. Say it's not just friends anymore but you're also following brands or brands pay your friends to act out something as well. Snapchat is the new MTV. With instant ability to chat…

look i have crazy theories which I think are sane and correct(they are) so I am willing to give this a shot. Can you please walk me through the next 5 years of how you see this progressing. As I said a lot, I am not a user but I don't find it compelling personally but i honestly would love to be proved wrong. If you could even do it high level, I would be really interested in core growth and monetization strategies.…

Not parent, but here's how I learned to understand snapchat.

Think like a younger Millennial (18-25 right now). Their whole social lives have been in public on FB/etc. They're going through a horribly awkward time in their lives, but it's all public. When they act like an immature kid, or aren't sexy, or whatever, that is recorded for all time.

So they feel incredible pressure to be sexy/fit/cool/smart/doing interesting things. People take hundreds of selfies to find the one that meets (what they think) their peers expect.

The pressure to be cool and attractive is intense. With FB, there is no escape.

Now Snapchat offers the opposite. People can "let their hair down", not have to look sexy or be cool, because the message is just temporary.

Most of the time I want candids, not portraits. FB made everything a portrait (intended for consumption by future selves/others).

SnapChat brought it back to the present by making it temporary.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#123

Post by dpeck »

bqe wrote: post #28

Can someone who uses Snapchat routinely tell me why you use it routinely? I've been using it for a few weeks to send a picture or two to the few people I know who use it, but it seems pretty limited. I follow a few "famous" people on it, and they basically just post random images of them walking around NYC or them traveling. I don't yet see the benefit.

My little sister uses it a lot and got me to get on so she could share her silly and over dramatic life a bit more. She's the only one I follow, but not for lack of trying. I know I have a few other friends on it but the ability to discover them seems to be lost on me.

I don't really get it, but she sends me goofy pictures or videos and I'll do the same. Could easily do it over imessage/txt and we do sometimes. I think she mostly digs the "my story" fanout aspect of things.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#124

Post by overcast »

pjc50 wrote: post #114
overcast wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why use cases 1 and 2 wouldn't just send a text message picture. Why would you bother with a 3rd party app that erases them? With that said, that is probably the least percentage reason as to why people use it. The greatest being for sending half naked photos to strangers.

Text message pictures are IME incredibly unreliable and you may be charged for them. And god help you if you accidentally send one internationally; who knows what it might cost?

So like international data costs over Snapchat?

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#125

Post by mdorazio »

anmilo wrote: post #75
bqe wrote: post #28

Can someone who uses Snapchat routinely tell me why you use it routinely? I've been using it for a few weeks to send a picture or two to the few people I know who use it, but it seems pretty limited. I follow a few "famous" people on it, and they basically just post random images of them walking around NYC or them traveling. I don't yet see the benefit.

I was highly skeptical, but as of the past few months i use it more than FB and Instagram. What I found was the limited and spontaneous nature of snapchat works well because it is much less formal and easy than a Facebook or Instagram post that I have to "compose". I.e, i can take a silly picture of my dog and put a sticker on it and fire it out there, without having to worry about shot composition/hashtag use (Insta…

I like how you encapsulated it here. This is actually exactly why I can't use Snapchat, but I understand the appeal for others. I mostly stopped using FB because I just don't have the patience or time for low-effort/low-quality posts, and Snapchat deliberately takes the post-level a step down and creates a sort of low-effort stream of consciousness between friends.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#126

Post by ethanbond »

vonklaus wrote: post #98
jtmarmon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If a snapchat clone came out tomorrow, snapchat wouldn't be as sticky" there have been plenty. facebook even launched one

I outlined my thoughts, a large social network would have to do it. linkedin, google, twitter, microsoft or facebook. LinkedIn, twitter, facebook being the most profitable. Maybe apple, for the security, weird FBI hacking thing although their software has gone down hill. I digress, what was the Facebook snapchat clone? I haven't heard of a large scale effort to clone snapchat yet. If I were to build a comparable univ…

> I haven't heard of a large scale effort to clone snapchat yet

That's how absurdly sticky Snapchat is.

It's been emulated many times over (incl. as mentioned above, by Facebook) – yet you haven't even heard of a single one.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#127

Post by overcast »

v64 wrote: post #99
overcast wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why use cases 1 and 2 wouldn't just send a text message picture. Why would you bother with a 3rd party app that erases them? With that said, that is probably the least percentage reason as to why people use it. The greatest being for sending half naked photos to strangers.

> I don't understand why use cases 1 and 2 wouldn't just send a text message picture. Why would you bother with a 3rd party app that erases them? Snapchat has more features than sending a simple text. I still use text message pictures when I just want to send a picture. Snapchat lets you caption and draw on photos, which is a big draw. The erasing part of it is a feature too, and not just for nude pics. For example,…

If you're that concerned/uncomfortable about what you're sending then don't send it in the first place. Once it's on the internet, it's there forever. Does Snapchat not have the feature now to save incoming messages for a price?

I'll grant you the feature of drawing on pictures though.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#128

Post by downandout »

argonaut wrote: post #35

People need to stop focusing their criticism on how stupid the app is or how they're going to lose all their users. It's almost a meme by now of how people say this every time Snapchat is brought up. By now it's a foregone conclusion, and requires active ignorance and not really caring to keep an open mind, to continue to hold onto that belief in the face of tremendous evidence that 1) Snapchat is very popular, 2) Sn…

I actually see Discover as their only redeeming feature. The interface is fantastic for mobile. They should just publish a set of Discover tags that sites can use to format their content for it, and let people use Snapchat as a browser. As a messenger, it's...just another messenger.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#129

Post by petercooper »

argonaut wrote: post #35

People need to stop focusing their criticism on how stupid the app is or how they're going to lose all their users. It's almost a meme by now of how people say this every time Snapchat is brought up. By now it's a foregone conclusion, and requires active ignorance and not really caring to keep an open mind, to continue to hold onto that belief in the face of tremendous evidence that 1) Snapchat is very popular, 2) Sn…

I'm a heavy Snapchat user and just sending stuff to a partner doesn't seem to be the main use case nowadays - it's stories (basically a video equivalent of Twitter and Instagram mushed together) or throwaway group sending.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#130

Post by richardking »

mdorazio wrote: post #116
chubot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that lots of people said Facebook wasn't monetizable either, just a few years ago.

I don't remember that. People thought that Facebook couldn't match Google-level ad revenue, but the monetization model was abundantly clear for Facebook as soon as it became obvious how much personal data they were tracking. Facebook IPO'd in 2012, at which point it already had over $4B in revenue, and had been generating revenue for years before that. The much better example is Twitter, which people did indeed say w…

There were lots of question on whether they could monetize on mobile when they IPO'd. I think their stock went down 33-50% from their IPO price until they showed they could make the transition.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/07/27/fac...

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