Almost ten years ago in September 2011, Snapchat was just an idea that founder Evan Spiegel and his college friends came up with while in class at Stanford University. Today, the company has over 300+ million active users. But how did Snapchat, an app that first made headlines as the "sexting app," come so far?
In the most ingenious of ways, Spiegel and his friends took a concept so common that it isn't even thought of, and created a monopolized company. Snapchat took how we communicate face to face and created a social media out of it. Unless we are sitting down to have a serious conversation with family or friends, we are doing most of our conversations on the go, whether it be passing someone while walking to class or waving to someone from across the street, these moments disappear.
Snapchat took this idea of fast communication that disappears and twisted it. Users of Snapchat take pictures of themselves or the areas around them, can caption, filter or draw messages on it, and send it out to their friends, knowing that the snapchat will disappear after the amount of time the user distinguishes; a concept way too similar to our regular day to day communication.
But why did Snapchat become such a thing amongst people of all ages? The answer is simple: the innovation was something other social medias did not have. All other social medias at the time served as a platform in which everything could be saved, stored, and documented digitally. Snapchat took the opposite approach and predicated the reality that moments are temporary. This innovation was envied by the other large social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, who attempted to buy Snapchat for $3 million dollars when it first came out. Of course, being the genius that he was, Spiegel declined and Snapchat's net worth sits around $2.5 billion.
Roger's Diffusion of Innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. This theory only enhances the idea that Snapchat's innovation was the reason that this social media platform over-succeeded. From the moment that Snapchat became an idea in a college class, Spiegel and his friends became instant social media revolutionaries and changed the way the social media world works
https://www.snapchat.com
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