The secret of Snap’s success: innovation
I love Snap: besides having the chutzpah to turn down Facebook in 2013 when it was still a minnow, and steadily improving since then, the social network has continued to grow, confounding those who predicted failure, and now has 332 million users, a lot more than Twitter. Evan Spiegel is definitely one of these entrepreneurs I’d be delighted to have in one of these quick 30 minutes Zoom conversations I often have in my classes.
The company, which doesn’t have much of a presence here in Spain, has just launched Pixy, literally a flying camera, a mini-drone with tracking that acts as a selfie stick, and which despite its limitations (the battery only lasts for a few flights, film quality is average, and is easily blown about by wind), is still an interesting and fun way to create content for the kind of people who use Snapchat. There are echoes here of the 2016 launch of the Spectacles camera glasses, launched with the company’s rebranding to Snap, and a clear commitment to redefining the role of the camera: given current technology, we can now put a camera almost anywhere and use these possibilities to create content.
That said, Snap has not met the analysts’ forecasts and its share price has fallen to around $50 billion. But it insists on doing things its own way, rather than copying the rest of the industry. Looking at the range of products the…
