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Snapchat CEO's Leaked Memo On Survival (techcrunch.com)
In a 6,000-word leaked memo to Cheddar's Alex Heath, Snapchat's CEO Evan Spiegel attempts to revive employee morale with philosophy, tactics and contrition as Snap's share price sinks to an all-time low of around $8 -- half its IPO price and a third of its peak. TechCrunch reports: "The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate," Spiegel stresses throughout the memo regarding "Project Cheetah." It's the chat that made Snapchat special, and burying it within a combined feed with Stories and failing to build a quick-loading Android app have had disastrous consequences. Spiegel shows great maturity here, admitting to impatient strategic moves and outlining a cohesive path forward. There's no talk of Snapchat ruling the social app world here. He seems to understand that's likely out of reach in the face of Instagram's competitive onslaught. Instead, Snapchat is satisfied if it can help us express ourselves while finally reaching even meager profitability.
Snapchat may be too perceived as a toy to win enough adults, too late to win back international markets from the Facebook empire and too copyable by good-enough alternatives to grow truly massive. But if Snap can follow the Spiegel game plan, it could carve out a sustainable market through a small but loyal audience who want to communicate through imagery. The report goes on to highlight nine of the most interesting takeaways from the memo and why they're important. They include: "Apologizing for rushing the redesign; Chat is king; Snapchat must beat Facebook as best friends; Discover soars as Facebook Watch and IGTV stumble; But Discover is a mess; Aging up to earn money; Finally prioritizing developing markets; Fresh ideas, separate apps; and The freedom of profitability.
Snapchat may be too perceived as a toy to win enough adults, too late to win back international markets from the Facebook empire and too copyable by good-enough alternatives to grow truly massive. But if Snap can follow the Spiegel game plan, it could carve out a sustainable market through a small but loyal audience who want to communicate through imagery. The report goes on to highlight nine of the most interesting takeaways from the memo and why they're important. They include: "Apologizing for rushing the redesign; Chat is king; Snapchat must beat Facebook as best friends; Discover soars as Facebook Watch and IGTV stumble; But Discover is a mess; Aging up to earn money; Finally prioritizing developing markets; Fresh ideas, separate apps; and The freedom of profitability.
I don't even use Snapchat and I could have told you MONTHS ago that they were about to fall off a cliff. How many stories were here on /. or on any other news site or discussion forum that had near unanimous hatred from the people about the changes. When even your star power is trashing the change and quitting, you fucked up.
The CEO is just now realizing this?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
> Snapchat must beat Facebook
*ok hand gesture*
Very best of luck with that.
Seeing them all the time lately. Fuck Cheddar.
But I fear this is too little too late. Prove me wrong, Evan.
SnapChat should have pulled a Verge and blamed racism for their problems.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
Perhaps he should've sent the memo through some kind of service that automatically self-destructs messages once they are read, maybe on some kind of timer. Someone ought to suggest that idea to him.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Nice to see the market punish this behavior. Don't "redesign" things without a good reason. And "good" isn't defined as "the rock star new hires we picked up with a VC money say we have to!"
99% of the redesign disasters we see are entirely unnecessary. The same end results can almost always be achieved in an incremental manner; one carefully introduced change at a time with minimum drama. That way when you screw up and your users start yelling you have an opportunity to step back, correct your mistake and demonstrate good will.
But it seems people just can't help getting suckered into big bang redesigns.
... And it worked like this. We would take two employees at a time into a room and leave them there with a switchblade knife on the table: "the one who lives keeps the job". It worked like a charm.
Another leaker has been identified and he has been suspended from his functions at a US 3 letter agency. He is soon to be permanently detained on further charges if he doesn't go straight to Gitmo.
Christopher Dale Reimer (aka creimer, The Original CDR, etc.) has been identified by JSOC as a Russian troll.
The Reimer family is typically from the Eastern part of Germany and it has been found that Chris have maintained contacts with homeland influencial people.
I would like to point out that East Germany was communist and controlled by Russia (CCCP) before Ronald Reagan took USSR apart.
U n i c o r n ! ! What did you expect..?
I work for a small start-up, sells to enterprises. The value is not in the ui.
We took a decision to not hire a full time ux/ui person or persons as we were concerned that the ux folks would strike out with the basic premise of the need to change ui - as a function of their job. Kinda like bizdev folks buy companies as thats what they're hired to do.
I suspect that snap chat hired ux folks who changed things to change things, without a LOT of data driving the decision. I did not read the tome from snap chat, but suspect that there was an emperors new clothes thing going on, and no one asked where the user feedback was as the new ux was being rolled out.
PS, kudos to Gmail for having a 'revert' setting to their new browser ui. I see little in Google taking time to understand the market outside of their little bubble, but at least they had a revert setting to make up for the regression in usability.
We have reached an interesting point in computing history, where software trends are socially driven. In the past software was for function (balancing the checkbook, word processing, business, education), or entertainment (games, consuming information). Games in and of themselves tend to be trends, like other forms of entertainment such as movies. People play the game until they "beat" it or become bored of it, new games that are (supposedly) better in some way or another come along, people then play those games.
Social software is different, in that the software itself isn't the focus, but the connectivity it provides socially. The quality (or lack thereof) of the software has no impact on its popularity - as long as the software is basically functional and usable. Do you think that one single Facebook user chose to be on Facebook because of the features of their software? Of course not.
Snapchat had one major draw that really kickstarted it. Supposedly, the messages weren't saved and went away after a brief amount of time. That was right around the time there were several high profile cases of high school students getting in trouble for sending pictures / messages that were inappropriate to one another using FB Messenger and texting. Snapchat seemed like a solution to that, so youth adopted it as a way of having privacy among themselves. The other thing it had going for it was that it *wasn't* FB, and their parents (especially the moms) were totally embracing FB. Typical youth to do something different than their parents just to be different.
Snapchat's days are numbered. As are Facebook's (although FB has the money and a more generic, all-encompassing platform so it will hang on for several more years). The social software generations are vastly shorter than human generations, as indicated by massive trends that have already come and gone (Myspace, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc). It's safe to say that within the next three years something will come along that will be the end of Snapchat. Whenever your platform is based on the "anti" anything (doesn't matter if we're talking about styles of music or clothing or software), the days are numbered until the whims of people change again.
Better known as 318230.
is that there are some many smart people spending so many hours and brain cycles on solving a totally unimportant problem.
I'm not peeving, just wondering if "too perceived as a toy" is acceptable now. I would have said "too much perceived" but wouldn't mind adopting "too perceived" -- it's shorter and it works, it's just unusual. I can't even find a stringent reason why. "Too copyable" seems unremarkable in comparison, even if the comparative (*perceiveder, *copyabler) doesn't work for either.