Evan Spiegel is an American internet entrepreneur who co-founded one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world – Snapchat, known for sharing temporary photo and video messaging application.  Spiegel’s idea has secured significant traction among the users, and in this process it is disrupting the established business model of several social media platforms, including Facebook as well as various messaging applications and telecom companies.

Snapchat allows its users to send pictures and videos called “snaps” with messages that self-destructs within a few seconds after the receiver has viewed the content.  It gained popularity around the world, especially among the young population, and has over 150 million users at present.

Snapchat raised US$1.8 billion in its latest funding-round in 2016, which took the company’s total funding-to-date to over US$2.6 billion, and its valuation to staggering US$20 billion.  The company’s revenue for the year 2016 and 2017 has been forecasted in the range of US$250 to US$1 billion.

What did it disturb?

The Snapchat allows users to engage in social messaging using multimedia tools and maintain spontaneity at the same time, without having to worry about managing a permanent online identity.  It started causing disruption to the core idea of several social media companies such as Facebook and Instagram and online messaging platforms, as well as to the global telecom companies.

The growing importance and popularity of Snapchat stems from the fact that it shares photos, and videos to other social media platforms without having to worry about keeping it permanently.  The shared content gets deleted automatically on Snapchat.  Thus, it provides better privacy option while still employing the basic and most important aspect of social media i.e. communication, in a much more entertaining and effective way.  In this process, the application is also transforming the mode of connecting people with each other.

Its innovative and effective messaging services allow users to communicate a lot more information with visuals in such a quick time, and it is also causing disruption to other social messaging apps such as messengers, WhatsApp, and Line.

In addition, Snapchat along with other Digital platforms is estimated to cause major disruptions to the revenue streams of several telecom operators around the world.  According to a study conducted by Ovum “Consumer OTT VoIP Outook:2013 to 2018”, revenue loss from messaging services to the global telecom operators due to rising demand of online applications including Snapchat and other similar platforms is expected to be around US$54 billion for the year 2016.  While, the report “The Future of Voice” by Spirit DSP pointed out that the revenues from voice services to global telecom companies is expected to decline to US$799.6 billion by 2020, which stood at US$970.4 billion in 2012.

How did the idea emerge?

Spiegel got the business idea during a discussion with one of his friends, Reggie Brown, at the Stanford’s Kappa Sigma fraternity house.  Following this discussion, Spiegel with Reggie Brown and their another friend at fraternity, Bobby Murphy, thought of an app as a business idea which would allow people to send “disappearing photos”.

The idea was first launched in 2011 with an ephemeral photo sharing app named “Picaboo”, which was an instant failure for the team.  Later, the application was renamed to Snapchat with some additional new features to overcome the initial flaws of the application.

Evan Spiegel and the Foundation of Snapchat

Born in June 1990, Evan Thomas attended Crossroads School of Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, and took design classes at the Otis College of Art and Design while still in high school.  He also attended classes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before joining Stanford University’s product-design program.

During his time at the Stanford University where he was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, he met fellow Bobby Murphy who hired Spiegel to carry out designing part for an online social network, inspired by Google Circles.  The venture, however, failed miserably. Still Spiegel was gaining attention, especially after co-founder of Intuit, Scott Cook, hired Spiegel for a project.  It was for broadcasting Web-based information via SMS texts in India, based on an impressive answer Spiegel gave to him while Cook was guest-lecturing the class.

In 2010, Spiegel again collaborated with Bobby Murphy to develop an online software called Future Freshman aimed at providing college admission guidance to parents, high schoolers, and guidance counselors.  This venture flopped as well for the duo.  At around this time, a discussion with another fellow Reggie Brown related to developing an ephemeral photo sharing software led to foundation of Picaboo in 2011.

Later, the revamped application started to get traction among the young people as a latest and innovative messaging and multimedia application.  An estimated 20 million photos shared on the platform within one year of its launch.  With the app’s increasing popularity, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reached out to Spiegel in 2013 to extend a buyout offer for Snapchat, which Spiegel turned down.

(Analysis of successful business models by DART Analysts)