Snap: From disappearing photos to blockbuster IPO

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LOS ANGELES — Snap, Inc. has come a long way from those disappearing photos.

Originally an app to share moments privately, Snapchat grew out of a Stanford University dorm room experiment that caught on big time with young mobile users.

The genesis? "What if we could send photos to friends and have them disappear?" recalled Snap, Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel, in a 2013 Paste BN interview. Why? "For fun," he said.

He pitched it to his Design and Business Factors class in June 2011 and the app appeared later that year.

"Most people that hadn’t used the product didn’t understand why it was so great," he said. "For my generation, we’ve lived our lives almost entirely online, everything we say and do is commented on, liked and retweeted and that gets really tiring. You want to look really cool to your friends, all the time, but you also want to have a place to hang out and be funny and hang around, and Snapchat has the ability to do that."

From just looking at photos, Snapchat eventually added video sharing as well.

Augmented reality

But it was what it did with photos that really made Snapchat stand apart from competitors like Instagram and Facebook. Snap added multiple features to the sharing experience, like colorful filters and funny faces with augmented reality that made it even more popular with teens and young adults.

Vertical video

Snap pushed to get its users to watch video the way they hold their phones — vertically. Despite the fact that vertical video gets cropped in vertical mode, and photographers urge folks to shoot in horizontal, Snap went for users' desires.

“Our viewers prefer vertical,” Snap vice president Nick Bell told Paste BN in 2015. “We’ve seen a nine times higher engagement rate with vertical rather than horizontal video.”

A camera company

As it prepares its new life as a public company, Snap has remade its image once again as a “camera” firm. Snap uses the smartphone camera term as a vehicle for sharing moments from our lives.

"In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones," Snap said its regulatory S-1 filing for the IPO. "We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate.

"Our products empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together."

Snap has expanded into hardware sales, with Spectacles, $129 video glasses that shoot 10-second video clips. Analysts expect Snap’s next moves to be an enhanced Spectacles that add augmented reality filters to the viewing experience. Various reports surfaced this week that Snap looked into selling a 360-degree virtual reality camera and even a drone under its name.

From 2013 - Snap's Spiegel on future

In this #TalkingTech Rewind clip from 2013, we look back at our interview with Snap, Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel, shortly after the company set up in Venice Beach, for a talk about what was next for the company then known as Snapchat.

Discover

Hardware sales are one way Snap plans to bring in more money and get profitable, but the bulk of the effort is in advertising. Beyond the Snaps, Snapchat also offers multiple viewing experiences on the platform, with quick hit, fast paced videos from the likes of CNN, Cosmopolitan and BuzzFeed. And now Snap has also dipped its toes into the waters of TV, with offshoots of NBC’s The Voice, ABC’s The Bachelor and Snap’s own curated news programming.

Stories

With Stories, Snapchat came up with a new way to share photos and videos: telling about your day using visuals that can be shared with your friends, instead of the whole world. And instead of disappearing within 10 seconds, Stories lasted for 24 hours. The feature turned out to be so popular that Facebook's Instagram and WhatsApp have both copied it.

The origin of Snapchat

In this #TalkingTech Rewind from our 2013 interview with Evan Spiegel, the co-founder of the Snapchat app recalls how he pitched it to his Stanford classmates, and the big problem he was trying to solve.

Snap has proven that it can attract a big audience — nearly 160 million monthly visitors who watch 10 billion videos daily. But can it turn a profit? The company lost $514 million on sales of $404 million in 2016, and user growth has started to slow. As investors prepare to pour money into Snap's coffers with the $3 billion IPO, they await to hear of the elusive profits from ephemeral images, pioneering AR and an app beloved by youth.

MORE ON SNAP:

Should you buy the Snap IPO?

What Snap needs to do next to maintain its edge 

IPO is a test for Snapchat's millennial users 

Who's getting rich off the Snap IPO

Follow Paste BN's Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham.