In just six years, Snapchat has become one of the most valuable apps on the market today. According to the Wall Street Journal, Snapchat is valued at nearly $22 billion.

With experiencing the highs and lows, Snapchat has remained on the list of the top three most downloaded apps. Along with Facebook, Twitter and others, Snapchat is doing quite well.

What began as a simple idea from a few college students has evolved as a leader in social media. This is the year where Snapchat finally comes out of the bag and stops being considered a “unicorn” startup.  This is why we keep an eye on the growth of this revolutionary company.

The story and conflicts

The story of Snapchat sounds like many other technology companies. It all started at Stanford’s elite college. Evan Spiegel was a rich young son of lawyers. He was a true computer nerd and good graphic designer. He became friends with Reginald Brown and decided to join the Kappa Sigma fraternity, where they met Bobby Murphy.

Murphy recruits Spiegel to help him with a social network program that was launched in 2010, under the name of FutureFreshman. The idea behind this website was to help facilitate the college application process, yet the project did not go well. The project did arouse something between them, an ambition to enter the business world.

Believed to have started in the previous year of Spiegel attending college, the idea of ​​Snapchat came about. “I would like the photos that I am sending a girl to disappear,” Brown told Spiegel in April 2011. His friend immediately became enthusiastic about the concept of making the photos disappear and told Brown that it was “an idea worth a Million dollars “(today worth billions).

Three young men started working and launched “Picaboo”. Yet during the same time frame,  Brown, Spiegel and Murphy started a fight for Picaboo property. This ended with Spiegel hanging up the phone and blocking Brown from all of the startup accounts. Spiegel and Murphy changed the name of the app to Snapchat in September 2011, its official anniversary.

The ascent

By the spring of 2012, the app had just over 100 users and to top it off, the price of the servers increased. Spiegel and Murphy were paying nearly $ 5,000 a month to keep the app working, and just as they were about to run out of money, Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners appeared and gave Spiegel his first check.

Shortly before finishing Stanford, Spiegel and his team moved to Los Angeles (strange thing, since most of the technology companies are in the Silicon Valley). By the end of 2012, Snapchat reached one million active daily users.

In February 2013, Reggie Brown the creator of the idea sued Murphy, Spiegel and Snapchat for kicking him out of the company. The trial ended years later with Snapchat giving $ 158 million to Reggie. Seeing its huge growth, Mark Zuckerberg, the executive director of Facebook, made a proposal for 3 billion dollars that Spiegel rejected.

One month later, someone hacked Snapchat. Very derogatory emails were exposed. In light of these sexist and homophobic emails from Spiegel, Snapchat continued to grow. With the integration of Snap Stories and Live Stories, investors valued the company at $ 10 billion in just three years.

Snapchat also began to accept external content. In January of 2015, he added the Discover section, this allowed publishers to post news and direct chat. They also found a way to earn money for the investors. They started to include ads in Geofilters and soon after that bought Looksery and Bitmoji.

As Snapchat evolved, Spiegel and Murphy bought Vergence Labs, the maker of the smart glasses Epiphany Eyewear. Later they changed the name Snapchat to Snap Inc. The name change also came with a motto change: Snap Inc was now “a camera company”.

The great exit

On February 2, 2017, Snap Inc. presented the documents for its IPO, ending the shortage of IPOs by technology companies. More than 158 million people use the application on a daily basis. That may seem like a very high figure, but Snap Inc. plans to raise $ 3 billion with its IPO.  The company wrote in its application this:

“When we were just starting out, a lot of people did not understand what Snapchat was and thought it was only meant for sexting. We were sure that the application was good for much more.”

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