Snapchat- The "group selfie app" that lets users exchange pictures and videos that are meant to disappear after they're viewed.

Strategy & Tools

Highlights

• April, 2011 - Stanford student, Reggie Brown supposedly came up with a idea for dissapearing photos, sexting app
  
  
• July, 2011 - Brown is joined by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy to build the app called Picaboo on IOS
  
  
• Summer 2011 - They promoted the app to their Stanford University community, and directly to the people in their city:
  
  - They pitched the app to people one on one,
  - Gave tutorials,
  - Went to shopping malls to hand out flyers,
  - Reached out journalists, 
  - Brown even tried positioning the app as a sexting tool “Picaboo lets you and your boyfriend send photos for peeks and not keeps!” - a draft of a press release he wrote.
  
  
• August, 2011 - Spiegel and Murphy kicked out Brown from the project.
  
  
• End of Summer 2011 - The app has 127 users - mostly founders' friends
  
  
• The Fall 2011 - Due to receving ease-and-desist letter from the photo book company with the same name "Picaboo", the app was rebranded to Snapchat
  
  
• The Fall of 2011 - Spiegel’s mother told their teenage cousin about the app. After that it went viral at a local high school in Southern California, and beyond. 
  
  
• December 2011 - January 2012 - The app grew from 3k users to 30k in a month.
  
  
• Early 2012 - Snapchat attracted the attention of mainstream press including New York Times. TechCrunch and others
  
  
• December 2012 - Facebook released Snapchat's competitor "Poke"
  
  
• November 2013 - Snapchat turned down a $3B acquisition offer from Facebook

Disrupting forever content
At the beginning, Snapchat let its users see the photos for max 10 seconds before disappearing.
Disappearing photos meant:

• saving memory on phones
• more no-filter pictures = less time to take a photo = more photos to send
  
• no worries about privacy exploitation

Timing
This was the time when many students got iPhones with front-facing cameras, which worked perfectly for the "group selfie app" - that's what Snapchat was known as.

Privacy
Snapchat introduced a built-in alert which notifies the sender if any of the recipients took a screenshot of the photo.

Along with dissapearing photos, Snapchat was the perfect place for private messaging.

Free expression & creativity
Snapchat introduced an option to add text to photos and draw on the them.

It let people express themselves in a way they weren't able before.

Tapping into high schoolers
It gave teenagers an opportunity to exchange messages quickly and left no evidence.
Although the media thought it was all about sexting, the 80% of Snapchat's images were sent during the day - the school day, to be exact. 

Not only for mobile usage
Snapchat become so popular among younger teens, because kids who didn't have cell phones or data plans could use it. They used it with an iPod touch.

Friction-Free Creation
After launching the app, the camera is immediately activated, encouraging instant photo-capturing. Traditional photo-sharing apps like Instagram open a feed to consume media, requiring an additional tap to create.

One-to-One Communication at Scale
Social media “feeds” are channels for communities.
These messages are implicit broadcasts, not directed to specific individuals.
Viewers have no obligation to respond and in some cases, may be hesitant to reply in a public forum.

Snapchat users must select who to send their message to.
They can send it to many people at once. 
It enables a single message to have a broad reach while maintaining intimacy of one-to-one communications, leading to a higher volume of messages sent and increased response rates as users feel more socially obligated to return the favor.

Read-confirmation
Each snap includes a read-confirmation, informing senders their message was viewed. This leads to higher response rates and faster replies, increasing usage.

Tools
Word of mouth
Publicity