> It's easy to get started — just pinch to zoom out and view the Map
Snapchat is one of my absolute "I'm getting old" triggers.
I absolutely cannot use it.
The app may have a notification-bubble on it, but when I start I have to swipe left and right randomly for a given period of time, until I finally, -for whatever reason-, land on a page where I can click the thing which caused the notification.
Why swiping left or right should "logically" lead to whatever it leads, I cannot tell. Often I find myself wanting to go -back- from some deeply nested screen, and to do that I have to swipe from right to left (as in "drag" the app -forwards-). WTF?
And now this. You can zoom out from a screen you never zoomed in to. Because that's clearly obvious.
This whole app is a UX disaster of proportions. I absolutely cannot see the appeal, nor how this app gained such a wide user-base.
Every time I accidentally side-swipe when trying to scroll (about one on five times or so) and land on some obscure functionality I have no reason why I'm being lead into, I'm getting one inch closer to just deleting the app and using whatever dumbed down web-version exists instead.
Can't we please have the big clicky buttons back? Anything except these "magical" swipes and gestures, seemingly only introduced by some weird cargo-cult "gestures are intuitive" following.
At least none of those web-versions has stupid "intuitive" gesture-based navigation and random side-swiping bullshit. And that makes them 100x more usable IMO.
As a UX designer, I think that Snapchat did this on purpose. They know that "the olds" will grow frustrated with the UI and won't use it, but they know that the younger crowd who have grown up with mobile interfaces and their accompanying interaction patterns (tap, swipe to reveal hidden items, long press to reveal hidden items, etc) will know how to navigate around the app and are willing to put up with the UI flaws.
This has two valuable results (at least from Snapchat's point of view):
1) Older people won't use it, which makes the younger generation perceive it as a safe space from their elders.
2) Advertisers are guaranteed a pool of younger users who have disposable income.
As for the appeal of Snapchat, it really lowers the cognitive barrier for updating people about your life. Personally, I spend more time curating items that I post on Facebook as it feels more permanent, but on Snapchat there isn't that pressure as the picture will disappear in 10 seconds or less.
I find snapchats interface to be extremely easy to use, and so do alot of my friends. It easily creates catagories, and becomes extremely intuitive. Personal on the left, creation in the middle, and stories on the right. I cannot think of a better way to do this.
Location based ads are a really tough nut to crack. If Snap wants to exist in the ad tech business going this route they will have to become bigger than Facebook or they will just fail. There is no interest in driving 3 persons to a store and no one will want to do it, especially agencies, because it's an enormous pain to setup and micro manage. Also, far less spend than video views or other les restrictive objectives. So if this is Snap strategy, good luck to them especially outside of the US and big Snapchat cities like London or Paris.
Zenly has definitely an amazing team, but I don't think their tech is that valuable, at least it's not a valid shield against what Facebook could come up with if they feel they should.
Based on the generally good approximation of 10% ownership for series B investors, this wasn't a great return (if any) for Benchmark.
Pretty nice for the founders though, and likely nice for the users too - Zenly's product requires all/most of your friends to use it for it to be good, which is really hard to do, but Snapchat already has a lot of users, so it'll take Zenly's tech and turn it into something valuable.
at the upper bounds (350 million) (10% is 35 million) with 22.5 million invested in 9/2016 and the sale shortly after that is a nice flip and a gain of 10+ million
They definitely got their money back, but venture economics dictate that the fund is paid for by the outlier returns (10 to 100 to 1000x or more) rather than a nice 1.5x.
1. Why don't they just build it themselves? That would cost probably low single-digit millions and maybe 1 year of time. I don't mean to downplay the work that went into Zenly but it's not like we're talking about self-driving car tech where there's a real technological entry barrier.
2. If, for some strange reason, they can't build it themselves and need to acquire, why do they go for the expensive VC-pumped startup instead of picking one or several of the hundreds of other less expensive options?
Given that Facebook is absorbing their userbase from every angle, literally, by implementing Stories in practically every app under the Facebook umbrella (WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram), that's a year of not having something differentiating to compete with.
Granted, Facebook can hit back pretty easily since they've got mapping down in Instagram and Facebook itself, but hey, it stands out.
Their website claims they use mysterious "patented algorithms" to do whatever they do with minimal battery hit (though I have not yet found a patent after searching the databases of the US, the EU, and France; that said, I only searched for the current company name, and maybe even failed at that)?
They have acquired recently another location based app called Placed. It is become pretty clear that they want focus in construct the best platform for Ads and content based on location. Maybe more than age, gender and education. That could be a shift in their started sttrategy when they only talked to Big world companies like Coke, Nike and Unilever.
Snapchat just update for me today and they rolled a new feature that I'm assuming incorporates what Zenly did. You can now share your location with friends and see public/shared locations and stories. I can now zoom around the map looking at snap stories of specific locations without waiting for Snapchat to show it to me. It also shows a heatmap over your map so you can see areas with heavy activity. You can't click on the "hot" areas, it's just info.
Interesting, I totally can tap any "hotzone" I want and Snapchat will serve me random videos from that approximate location. It's very interesting to watch sporting events.
Every time I see a company I've never ever heard of get acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars, I have to step back and wonder what an interesting world we live in.
Zenly has one of the best teams here in Paris (and there are lots of great teams).
They also have awesome tech, AFAIK they're the first to leverage gomobile to create a cross platform (iOS/Android + backend) "transport" code based on grpc.
It's still weird to see the founders exit now since they should still have a lot of runway after last year's round. But it's probably safer given the company doesn't make any money yet.
This, plus the fact that benchmark is one of the major sharehold of snapchat, and the main shareholder of zenly, plus the fact that snapchat is currently having a not-that-good user growth, and that the share is tanking...
All of this makes me wonder what kind of financial trick is under that deal. Any proficient VC that could explain what could be going on here ?
EDIT: the stats are 4 millions users not two. But that's still 70$ per download .
Instagram was financially a steal for FB, in retrospect. And no, you can't just say "they paid this much for download, that is dumb". There is a lot of nuance, for example:
- Does the company need it to survive or succeed?
- Can the acquiring company better monetize or grow the asset?
- Are the growth trends exponential, such that a huge amount of other people may soon be using the product?
- Is there some strategic advantage to the team - or product category expertise?
- Is the product easily defensible? (e.g., strong network effects)
I can't speak to this particular acquisition, but there are a number of examples where heavily "overpaying" may actually be a steal in the long term (and of course, the opposite).
I wonder if Snapchat will manage to get this money back in one way or another. Instagram is a massively popular app, while Zenly - it is HN where I first heard it. Also, 2 million downloads mainly from teens seem to be not so massive. There are bigger and more unique apps.
I wonder how often deals like that comes from pressure from VC's rather than actual strategy.
Yeah, but what I don't get about this, is that building that tech (if it's just a map and pin tracking your friends) is not hard. And certainly wouldn't be hard for Snap.
I can't see how 2 million users are worth it either. It really isn't even that many anyways because I'm sure many were already snap users)
Unless it's because they really wanted to do Snap map and are basically paying to have a fast implementation and have that many people with it enabled from day one.
This way when Instagram copies them it will take a few months.
