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Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

techcrunch.com

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Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#161

Post by mindgam3 »

justicezyx wrote: post #156
mindgam3 wrote: post #80

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…

original Snapchat was not fundamentally innovative and game-changing...

Actually, their whole “disappearing messages” thing was perfectly positioned for the teen market as the polar opposite of “post once and it’s there forever” Facebook. I never used it myself, but for a certain subset of people, not just dick pic senders, this was a pretty big differentiator/selling point. Enabling a whole new class of behavior for millions of people.

So yeah, although the innovation never progressed beyond a killer feature for some users, it was still... innovative.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#162

Post by bb2018 »

justicezyx wrote: post #156
mindgam3 wrote: post #80

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…

original Snapchat was not fundamentally innovative and game-changing...

Technologically maybe - but I think it did define the idea of a social network being primarily (if not entirely) phone/camera based. I had been off social media for years but found Snapchat fun and interesting enough to rejoin (for a few years)

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#163

Post by [deleted] »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #99
ethbro wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This isn't quite fair. You can just as easily A/B your company to death. A/B usual represents an incremental comparison from one situation to another, and it helps 'walk down the feature path' ... but when you need to change paths, A/B testing is not going to help, this is where a bit of great PM talent is going to work. Moreover, the more subtle the change, or more the basis' are not very comparable (two different a…

[deleted]

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#165

Post by MrMember »

realusername wrote: post #159
sytelus wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They were changing things all the time anyway, in 6 months I had maybe 3 complete redesign of the home page. And if you were on Android like me, you know testing and stability certainly wasn't part of the company motto, Snapshat was easily the most buggy mainstream app I know.

One update broke notifications for me for like three months. The Android client is a joke.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#166

Post by shanghaiaway »

tEMporality7 wrote: post #70
pavlov wrote: post #21

”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 bel…

> "Developing markets, not the U.S.” I thought he hated developing markets?

He does. And poor people. And old people. He still wants the money of advertisers targeting these groups though.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#167

Post by realusername »

MrMember wrote: post #165
realusername wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were changing things all the time anyway, in 6 months I had maybe 3 complete redesign of the home page. And if you were on Android like me, you know testing and stability certainly wasn't part of the company motto, Snapshat was easily the most buggy mainstream app I know.

One update broke notifications for me for like three months. The Android client is a joke.

Yeah notifications broke for a pretty long time indeed...

That's hard to believe but during my one year of usage before I gave up, I had an issue with playing videos. Videos were always laggy, they would play for two seconds and then freeze until the end. They did not fix that in one year of updates.

And that's a core feature of the app, it's unbelievably buggy, it would be the same as Facebook freezing when you like a post or Youtube freezing when switching videos.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#168

Post by Anaphylaxis »

ryanwhitney wrote: post #112

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 unsen…

At least the memes are decent.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#169

Post by n767 »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #104
willio58 wrote: post #61

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 c…

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.

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.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#170

Post by krn »

lysp wrote: post #136

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 /…

> 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.

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