Leaked Snapchat memo explains the company’s next move

Snapchat and Instagram are two of the largest photo-based social media apps in North America, but a leaked memo detailing Snapchat’s plans suggests that the company has realized it has to stop chasing the number one spot and instead focus on profitability.

Snapchat’s grown a lot since its humble beginnings as a way to discreetly send suggestive images to people into a legitimate communication tool that’s pioneered modern app features.

It’s been in the last few years where Snapchat has faced increased competition from Instagram and its parent company Facebook. In an effort to win back its users, Snapchat launched a redesign that flopped and ultimately turned into a massive misstep.

In the leaked memo, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel even mentions how disastrous the redesign was for the company. “The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate,” said Spiegel in the leaked memo that was reported by Cheddar. 

The company’s learned from this failure, though. It appears that Spiegel’s newly plotted course aims the company towards developing markets, adults, improving Discover and committing to chat on the service.

Snapchat thinks that it can beat Facebook at its own game since people generally use the platform to communicate with those they’re close with. Facebook, on the other hand, is a digital catch-all for co-workers, classmates, estranged family members and everyone else.

Snapchat’s Discover is doing well. The memo claims over 18 shows reach monthly audiences of over 10 million viewers. That said, even though Discover is doing well, it still has lots of room for improvement. Specifically, the section is crowded and packed with clickbait-type articles.

The company is looking to expand into older demographics since these users generally have more revenue, according to the memo. One of the challenges of this is to convince older users that Snapchat is a communication platform instead of a social media platform, since social media is often seen as a waste of time.

Spiegel also mentioned that Snapchat is starting to look at developing markets as places where they can expand its operations. TechCrunch reports that the app is being overhauled to work better with low-bandwidth connections and slow loading videos on Android.

Finally, the company wants to stop building all of its new ideas into the core Snapchat app. Instead, it wants to put its innovative ideas into new apps. Currently, the company is working on an AR experience based on user-submitted geo-tagged Snaps.

The full memo is 15 pages and 6,000 words long and is published online at Cheddar here. 

Source: Cheddar Via: TechCrunch

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