This billion-dollar sexting app said “No” to Facebook !

In 2011, Evan Spiegel and his friend Reggie Brown came up with an idea — photos that disappear after viewing.

The core motive of their idea was not just to have a way to send disappearing photos but to make the process of sending nudes more convenient and safe, without any risk of them being there on the internet forever.

And hence they started their company under the name “Picaboo”.

They then went on to look for a tech co-founder and stumbled upon Bobby Murphy, who built the app.

Later on, they’d get rejected by tons of investors and also learn that the business name is already taken.

So, they had to come up with a new name and hence introduced — Snapchat.

The primary target audience that Snapchat targeted was teenagers, and the company was rapidly growing, with new users joining every month.

All with word of mouth.

The app was very convenient for teenagers with the aspect of disappearing photos and also because it didn’t include any of the older generations.

And thus, followed investors and fundraising.

But the use-case of Snapchat would soon spin from “sexting” to a “communicate medium”.

And that helped the company to change its narrative.

Very soon, Snapchat came under the radar of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuck called the founders and made proposed a deal of 60 million dollars.

He said that they’d have total control over their own company too.

Evan said no. But Zuck would not let go of this.

He then launched “Poke” — a copycat of Snapchat.

But…Poke failed within just a few weeks.

And this, in fact, became a blessing for Snapchat as due to the introduction of Poke, users, in general, got accustomed to the concept of sending disappearing photos.

Snapchat gained more traction, and Evan called Poke — the greatest Christmas gift ever!

After introducing new features like stories and “filters, Snapchat grew like crazy.

In 2013, Zuck made another offer to Snapchat. This time it was a staggering 3 billion dollars.

But, again, Snapchat turned Facebook down.

Fast forward to today, Snapchat is valued at $15 billion.

It touched an all-time high of more than $120 billion in September 2021.