He has not yet reached the area of ​​power in the neighborhood of Elon Musk ($13,4 billion) or Mark Zuckerberg ($56,7 billion), but Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is making good progress with a current fortune of $3.3 billion. Snapchat, just like Facebook and Twitter, is a social media app. The big difference between these apps is that Snapchat does not have a timeline and that the videos or photos sent disappear after a few seconds. The app is extremely popular among young people, as many as 3 billion 'snaps' (messages) are sent every day. Mark Zuckerberg also noticed that users were being poached from his platform and decided to make a proposal to Spiegel: a takeover offer of 3 billion euros or compete with his Facebook. Spiegel declined this offer and the business world was perplexed: a brilliant or stupid move? Snapchat continued to grow and Spiegel received a salary after working this year. Snapchat went public under the name Snap Inc, making Evan Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy billionaires in one fell swoop. Not bad for a 27 year old. How did he do it? What can we learn from this young billionaire?

After falling comes rising

Trial and error is part of being an entrepreneur. Spiegel experienced this during the launch of Picaboo, Snapchat's predecessor. The idea for Picaboo, a chat app with temporary content, arose when a fraternity member talked about a photo he had sent someone and which he had regretted. Spiegel got excited and Picaboo was born. The app appeared in the App Store in July 2011, but Instagram momentum failed to materialize (Instagram already had 10.000 app downloads on the first day). Investors also had little interest, because why would someone send a photo that immediately disappears? The app did not catch on and a month later Picaboo only had 127 users, a deception. However, Spiegel refused and decided to rebrand Picaboo to Snapchat, including the iconic ghost. The rebranding was a success, because the app became extremely popular among students. In December 2011, Snapchat had 2.241 users and in January 2012 this number increased to 20.000. Snapchat fell, rose and conquered, because the chat app currently has around 178 million users.

Stay unique

Every company has its unique characteristics that make them different from the competition, but it is very tempting to look at the competition and blindly “copy” characteristics that may not suit your company at all. Spiegel was not distracted by Mark Zuckerberg, who launched innovation after innovation with Facebook. In fact, it was Zuckerberg who launched an exact copy of Snapchat on the market at the end of 2012 under the name Facebook Poke. The new Facebook app received a lot of publicity at its launch, but was mainly described as a copy of Snapchat. Facebook ultimately lost the battle and the Facebook Poke project flopped. Stay unique as a company, it is praised by your customers and it is also the reason why customers chose you.

Age does not always play a role

Experience comes with time, or does it? Spiegel is only 27 years old and was 25^e the world's youngest billionaire. At this age he was already number 327^e place on the Forbes 400, the list of the 400 richest Americans, and to think he never graduated from Stanford. Yet Spiegel does not lack experience. For example, he took various courses in the field of product design at the Arts Center College of Design in Pasadena and worked as a marketing intern at RedBull. Age does not always play a role, just look at the experience and capabilities a person has.