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Comment by corford | Hacker News Reader

I know Evan Spiegel's a seriously smart guy but I can't shake the feeling that Snapchat is the Myspace of the current batch of unicorns and he's going to eventually regret not selling to FB or Google back in 2013.

Though I thought FB stock would slip and permanently stay under $30 after the IPO so what do I know :)

From this NYtimes list, my two favourites are SpaceX and Stripe.

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>> Snapchat is the Myspace of the current batch of unicorns and he's going to eventually regret not selling to FB or Google back in 2013.

If by MySpace, you mean a social network that had a meteoric rise then sort of died out, perhaps. But MySpace actually did take the giant buyout they were offered. As far as I know, they never turned down a 10 figure exit like Snapchat.

Meteoric rise transforming to mass exodus and lots of dormant accounts in the space of a couple of years is what I meant. Myspace guys timed their exit well and Murdoch got left holding the baby. Just wondering if Speigel has missed the boat or if he'll manage to pull off a spectacular heist before a Myspace style user exodus starts (if, indeed, one ever does).

Though $800 million in the bank and a $15 billion valuation provides a pretty decent war chest to gobble up threatening competitors with...

In that sense, I can see it happening. Only quibble I've got is that most of the user exodus happened post-acquisition. I was an early user (in high school I dated a girl who knew Tom somehow who got me started), and what ultimately pushed me out was that after the acquisition, the site started getting plastered with ads. The smartest timing, to me, was Facebook opening up to those without .edu addresses about a year after MySpace got acquired. While we all thought Facebook was just "blue MySpace", the lack of intrusive ads was really the thing that drove my switch.

That's really interesting. So I guess, if we try and transplant this over to Snapchat, one failure scenario would be something like: Snapchat gets acquired for an outrageous sum before user engagement plateaus, Spiegel and team ride happily off in to the sunset and the acquirer then tries to monetise the userbase with adds and other junk, triggering the start of an exodus. All we need to identify is a nascent startup to play facebook's facilitating role in the drama and the circle is complete :)

Is there a disappearing messaging app that's blue?

Serious question, in what ways is Snapchat similar to MySpace? Poor UI and disregard for user experience? Buggy code? Bloated executive team? Bureaucratic management? The only parallel I see is that it's a trendy technology among a younger cohort that tends to be very fickle.

The only parallel I see is that it's a trendy technology among a younger cohort that tends to be very fickle.

Which is presumably what the OP was talking about. MySpace was hyped and valued beyond belief, and then came crashing down. The same could well happen to Snapchat.

The last one is the obvious one and I think it's big enough to kill them. Unlike, say, Whatsapp, Snapchat's demographic is extremely teen & early twenties heavy. That's the worst demographic to be in if you're a hip app/product/service looking for longevity (and your only real party trick is messages sent through your service are ephemeral). Users in this demographic are also terrible for monetising (unless you're a game :) ).

Having said all that, I'm judging it from anecdotal evidence available to me. None of my friends use snapchat (all late twenties and early thirties) but they do use twitter, fb, vine (on occasion), whatsapp etc. The only people I know that have snapchat on their phone and use it regularly are all < 23 yrs old. Of course, could simply be my friends and I are totally out of touch!

Edit: interestingly, just realised none of my friends (female or male) use pinterest either (which, from what I've read, has a wider demographic). So maybe we're just a bunch of luddite weirdos...

I'm 26, one year ahead of Spiegel in school (my brother was his year at Stanford), and I don't use Snapchat (I have an account, I download it maybe every other month to see what's changed, but have never been able to get into it). I'm an outlier in my social circles. All my friends use it. Also, a few weeks ago, Bill Simmons (Grantland creator) used it while at Wrestlemania. One year ago, he would have tweeted it from @GrantlandLive. Grantland has been really good at leveraging social technology, and were ahead of the curve on livestreaming, so to me, the fact that basically everyone I know my age and younger uses Snapchat, and that an organization that's done a great job using social tools is starting to try and figure it out tells me that its here to stay for at least the near future.

Snapchat will need some features (apps) that make it sticky to this demographics. They tried SnapCash (sending money with SquareCash), and Discover (popular videos content/news sponsored by content providers). I don't know if these are enough to keep the users.

It would be interesting to know what's the percentage of Snapchat users still use it daily after high schools. That would make or break the whole company.

Was there ever any resolution with the guy who claimed to have been a SnapChat co-founder but was squeezed out by Spiegel?

I imagine that would play (or would have played) some role in his decision.

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