At the beginning of the year, there were many press conferences, and I made a bold guess: Toutiao may acquire Snap. At that time, Snap was at an all-time low, its market value fell from $30 billion to $8 billion, and user growth was stagnant and commercialization could not see the end. The American media discussed Snap’s headlines as “How Snap became Twitter” and “Snap”. will be acquired in 2019." Twitter, which was first predicted by the media to be "dying", gradually completed its recovery in 2018, while Snap reversed the decline in Q1 user data and revenue this year, and its stock price has risen by 170% so far, reaching 20 billion US dollars. The logic behind Twitter and Snap's resumption of growth after being undervalued is quite similar: Clarify strategic goals, organize cultural changes, increase revenue and reduce expenditure for commercialization, and benefit from the commercial realization of Ins/FB Stories, which lowers the threshold for advertisers to put in, and the revenue data has improved well.
Interestingly, both phone number list Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Snap CEO Spiegel were once fanatical Steve Jobs believers - Jack Dorsey created his own image of "Jobs II" after being forced to step down as Twitter CEO in 2009; And Spiegel never hides his admiration for Jobs, and he has a portrait of Jobs hanging in his office. Jack Dorsey, who successfully returned, failed to save the company by relying on a genius product design, and began to grow a beard in his image, distinguishing it from the image of "Jobs II". When the media reported on Spiegel, an obvious sign was that Snap had taken Amazon as its learning object. "The only person Spiegel wants to work for is Bezos." 3 of the 8 executives with the prefix are from Amazon. From Jobs to Bezos, from product to company. 1. The problem of Snap Snap's change over the past year and a half has been quite ups and downs. In the November 2017 article "Resolutely Bearish Snap", he expounded on the three problems Snap faced at the time: (1) The era of product-driven has passed The product is just a shell. Without internal strength, the product itself is not a moat. A good company will not be easily copied, and competition at the product level is easily copied.
Facebook has been frantically integrating Stroies into various products, and Snap has nothing to deal with. (2) The product has no advertising space and cannot precipitate content Only precipitating relationships without precipitating content is destined to be difficult to sell advertisements, and Snap’s business monetization ability is very poor. When the number of users leads Twitter, its revenue is less than one-third of the latter. (3) The corporate governance structure is too bad After the company raised funds, the first thing the founder did was to move the office to the beach. The company’s market value fell by 60%, and the founder was still in Paris to have a wedding with a model. When Snap went public in early 2017, user growth had already begun to decline. At this time, Snap has a very high share of young users in Europe and the United States, and the subsequent user growth will either be based on geographic generalization or age group generalization. However, the launch of Ins Stories in the same period basically blocked the possibility of age generalization and dispelled the motivation of hundreds of millions of users to even try to use Snap. At the end of 2017, Snap CEO Spiegel came to China to learn from Kuaishou and Toutiao, and chatted with Su Hua and Zhang Yiming. Back in November, he launched a major product revision to strengthen the consumption of short video content: