India Is Too Poor, Snapchat Is for the Rich People – Evan Spiegel | Hacker News Reader

India Is Too Poor, Snapchat Is for the Rich People – Evan Spiegel

indiatimes.com

35 pointspknerd17 comments

Cultural attitudes and differences still exists in this globalized economy. Premonitions like "Indians are poor" are the basis of western businesses misjudging the markets in developing nations. Get out of your cocoon if you want to develop your business internationally. US is not the world. It is true that Indians(including myself) are value minded. You need a different business model that caters to a higher volume than looking gor higher margins. But, saying Indians and Spanish are poor so I won't focus on them is just naive. You could instead say - "I don't want my business, in a low-margin market like India because I don't know how to make money there." and that is understandable.

Did you read the story?

This is an alleged comment made in a private mtg in 2015. When in private do you make full statements with nuance every time you speak?

I did read the story, and the fact that he said it in 2015 doesn't matter to what I opined. I'm not crying out loud that someone said something bad about the country I was born in. I'm just sharing my opinion in a forum of hackers (who could end up running businesses in India) that businesses work differently in India, and that a CEO of a billion $ startup would be just naive to not realize that and word his views accordingly.

If I say something that misses the point entirely, I expect my friends to just tell me, I'm wrong, and also tell me why. That's what I intended to do. Albeit publicly.

What proof is there that he actually said this, and what were his exact words?

India it is very poor. What Evan said was India was'nt an appropiate market to invest in. India is poor, that is a fact. You shouldn't be offended by the true. Everywhere you find richs and poors, but yeah, India is a poor country, deal with that!

May be he forgot to check this - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_num...

How does having billionaires mean there is a large population that you can monetize?

Hey you just gave me an idea. An exclusive photo sharing app for people who are worth a billion dollars or more. I mean, how will those poor people show off their private mansions without attracting unnecessary scrutiny? Since the service has no need to scale, I will personally visit every billionaire to verify their identity when they join. And then I will start a bidding war amongst all the luxury goods makers to advertise on my network.

All I need to do now is to befriend a few billionaires.

> “I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.”

Spain is a poor country?

I was prompted by your question to search around, and I saw this site which puts two sets of country economic data side by side [0]

[0]https://country-facts.findthedata.com/compare/122-131/India-...

Decent website, but pretty sure it's not 100% polished yet. One (of several) things that threw me off was the "Female Survival Rate to Age 65" comparison. I was shocked to see that India is only at 3.7%, and the color filling in the picture also makes it seem so. It is actually 73.7% and the 7 is hiding in the picture.

Spain is a wealthy country with very happy people :) I bet Evan Spiegel was never in Spain

Indian here, I'll cross post from Facebook.

"Why Netflix? Torrent karle." "Steam? Tu rich hoga bro." "Tu apps ke liye pay karta hai? WTF!" (don't think I need to translate)

... and we get offended when Evan Spiegel points out the (bitter) truth.

My wife would rather torrent potato-quality VCD's than pay to rent a DVD. As far as I can, it's what she was used to when the Indian video shops were just copying VHS tapes in the backroom to rent out.

Except Snapchat makes money through ads.

When it comes to content, Indian's don't think of it as something tangible.

The main reason though is downloading content through torrents is considered the way to go.

I feel with Netflix and Prime are out there to capture this market, with TVF being the local player, this change of philosophy is just starting to shift.

Translations which parent should have offered:

"Why Netflix? Torrent karle." Why Netflix? Torrent it.

"Steam? Tu rich hoga bro." Steam? You must be rich, bro.

"Tu apps ke liye pay karta hai? WTF!" You pay for apps? WTF!

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