How Snapchat Started
In 2011, Stanford students Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy went out to create a social media platform that they could share pictures that would self-delete after a certain amount of time. The original idea came from Reggie Brown, who then contacted Evan Spiegel for his business expertise, who then contacted Bobby Murphy for his coding experience. Throughout 2011 and 2012, the three of them worked on about 34 different prototypes until they finally released Picaboo, which came out in July of 2011.
After the launch, Reggie was outed of the company, and by September of the same year the app relaunched under the name Snapchat. In 2012 and as a senior in college, Reggie started a legal battle to get his rights as the inventor of Snapchat. Following a two-year lawsuit, the matter was finally granted out of court in September of 2014 where Reggie was granted nearly $160 Million and credit as one of Snapchat inventors.
Since its launch in 2011, Snapchat exploded especially when they invented Snapchat Stories in 2013. Initially, this feature allowed users to compile snaps into storylines. But less than a year later, Stories had surpassed by far just the person-to-person private messaging. More features were built upon Stories, with Live Stories in 2015 and Custom Stories in 2017. And Filters were introduced in 2015, which boost the app's popularity by a lot. You can often see when Snapchat releases something that is popular either Facebook or Instagram will take it and vice versa
Although Snapchat’s success is linked to its ephemeral nature, this isn’t because people are sending inappropriate and sensitive things. In fact, researchers found that around 75% of people use Snapchat because it’s “fun” and they don't really have to think about what they're sending.
Nowadays, the company boasts a whopping 190 million daily active users worldwide, and they reach more than 90% of all 13 to 34 years old in the US. But the prevalence hasn’t come without its issues. their target demographic is less loyal and much likely to climb on whatever is the next trend. and their advertising ROI is a lot less valuable than Facebook and Instagram.
Nevertheless, as of June 2019 Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc, is valued at nearly $15 billion, which is nearly double its valuation that it was in January 2019 at $8 billion.
and that's How Snapchat Started!