Snapchat (?!) | Acquired Podcast

When Snap launched, there were infinite way to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button - why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages - isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are ... See more

one tangible example of that is when I was at Facebook I joined in the midst of Snapchat's ascendancy and there was a lot of feelings about how are we doing should we be worried and the way that we would have that conversation would be how many times per week do people share on Facebook... I think we should have been asking what we would ask at the

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People laughed at Snapchat, but now people see them as an example of strong graph design and unique points of view.

Snapchat was not a text messaging app. Snapchat was not a social network. Snapchat was something new. Words escaped it because it was novel—beyond our vocabulary at the time. Old, referential language failed to explain Snapchat.

But then we could do things — we had a principal called Do the Simple Thing First and it’s funny to think about doing that when you have millions or even a billion users, but even our ad tech, we know we couldn’t integrate right at the beginning just because the systems were different. So v1 was manually insertion, not even programmatic selling wi

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