Snapchat went from zero to 10 million in a year in revenue for the company.
I remember presenting to my design class at the time thinking it was such a cool idea and everyone was like, this is silly.
It took 10 people that got us to around 50 million a year with Comfort. One really good hook can take your business to almost nine figures.
That's always when I'm the most anxious. When everything's like working, I'm like, uh-oh.
Being stressed, thinking everything is going to crumble around you and that everything is going to [__] is completely normal. It's actually a great sign.
Welcome guys. We will get into why I've never been at Disney in a second, but welcome to the Paradigm Podcast. I am here with my dear friend Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat. I just have to say this is a full circle moment for me. A lot of you guys know my story of how I started and how Purely White was even able to make a little bit of money so that I could get to where I am today. And it's all thanks to Snapchat. So, sitting here with Evan today is the definition of thoughts become things and how I had this insane crazy vision that no one believed in and now I'm sitting with the guy that literally made it all possible for me to even get my traction in e-commerce. So, I'm here with Evan today. Evan, thank you so much for joining, dude.
Oh, I'm so happy to be here and so excited for everyone to hear the story, too, because it was really inspiring to me. So, thanks so much for having me on.
Of course. And you know, you guys know that this is more of a conversation than it is a podcast. And you know, it's just two friends talking about business and life and, you know, the journey and what we've gone through and, you know, just want to give you guys some gems just along the way before we go into Disney. Actually, everyone's waiting. They want... everyone's waiting. I've never been to Disney. So, they have roller coasters and like, what the [__] do they have Epcot? Is Epcot in LA, too?
Epcot's Orlando. Orlando is like a whole different, I mean it's just massive, right? It could probably like, I mean you could fit like Disneyland LA into or Anaheim into like a parking lot of the one in Orlando. It's crazy.
Yeah, I got to go. I got to figure this out. And I'm like a nerd with that stuff, too. Do you play video games or no?
A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I just recently got back into Starcraft, which was...
You don't know Starcraft?
Is it a computer or is it...
So good. It's like what I grew up playing in middle school. And one of my buddies the other day was like, should we like play Starcraft? And...
fired it up. It's great. It's so good.
World of Warcraft was like my, that was my thing growing up. Yeah. I actually talked about it on another podcast. World of Warcraft.
How far did you get? I mean, were you like...
No, like I have like 10 level 80s. Like I'm a little... yeah. It's not healthy. So, I want to jump in and just kind of start by asking you, obviously Snapchat is this unbelievable company that you've built, you know, for over a decade now. I want to know before you started Snapchat, like before you had this successful amazing brand, what was the mindset around you wanting to go start your own thing? Like you were in school, Stanford.
Like what was that journey like for you before Snapchat? Like what was the mentality behind that? What were you going to school for? And then how did that kind of shift into you building your own thing?
Yeah, you know, I had a couple sort of really important experiences early on. I think the first was my dad was always, you know, anytime I was at home, my dad was like, 'Get a job, get a job, get a job.' So like, you know, whether it was like, you know, being the ball boy at basketball camp when I was really young, you know, or ultimately interning for a guy who did marketing at Red Bull, or I worked doing drug discovery at Abraasis Bioscience. I had so many different experiences with jobs early on. And one of my big takeaways from all those jobs was I really didn't want to work for anyone else. So I think my direction of travel was always trying to build something or create something or start something. And you know, I was just really lucky to meet Bobby. He lived across the hall from me in college. He's my co-founder at Snapchat. And...
we just started trying to build stuff together. We had, you know, a disaster of a startup called Future Freshman, which we worked on for 18 months. That, you know, despite two of our siblings applying to college, neither of them used. It was, you know, a tool to help you with the college process. But ultimately we started working on Snapchat, I guess, my junior year of school at the time. It was called Pickaboo. And I guess the rest is history. So...
When did you start to see like real traction in the business? Like the early days when you first kind of got in it, like was it exactly what you wanted, like the vision when you started it? Were you like, this is exactly what you wanted it to be and that's what it ended up being, or did it change along the way when you guys were kind of figuring out the kinks?
There were a couple really big insights early on. The first one is that people actually didn't care about disappearing messages. That was the genesis of the idea, one of the reasons why it was called Peekaboo. But what we learned really early on, and even, you know, I remember presenting to my design class at the time presenting Pikaboo thinking it was such a cool idea and everyone was like, 'This is silly. Like you can always save a screenshot or save a picture, like it doesn't work, right?' And one of the key insights early on was that despite people not caring as much about sharing disappearing photos, what they loved was that you could send photos really quickly...
because we had invented a new way to send photos much faster than...
MMS at the time. Sending them via text message at the time would take like a minute, right, back in the day. And so we invented a way to send photos much faster and Snapchat opened directly into the camera so you could use photos really to communicate. And that's really what, you know, our friends started using, my younger, you know, sister started using, and my cousin for example. And so, you know, even though it wasn't big at the time, you know, maybe there were 20, 30 people using Snapchat in the beginning, we just had fun, you know, sharing photos back and forth all day.
Dude, my brother, that just reminded me, my brother when streaks was like the biggest thing in the world. My brother, something happened with his phone and he had like a 400 day streak with like one of his friends and then his phone didn't work and he lost his streak and he cried for the whole day. I was like, 'Dude, you're going to get it back.' He's like, 'No, you don't understand. You don't know the hard work we've put into this streak.' That's the first time this memory has come back to me. That gamification of like people going every day and building a habit around an application, because I've been using Snapchat forever. Please never go into my Snapchat.
My Snapchat was like, it was like everything for us when we were kids. And I think that is definitely like something that you guys created that no one else in the market was at the time and I think never has. Fast sending photos, yes. Disappearing messages, yes. But then at the same time, like when you guys did the Snap Shows and then you guys have like, you know, the Spotlight, like it just created an entire ecosystem that I think is like pretty incredible. But I think there's two things that I wanted to mention around some of the stuff that you guys are doing right now. And one of them is Specs. Like I need to understand more and I think a lot of people want to understand more. Can you just talk a little bit through when the vision started with Specs to now? What has that journey been and that process been for you?
Yeah. Oh my gosh, we could spend days on this one. So Specs are our new augmented reality glasses. They're like a full computer in a pair of glasses. But they overlay computing on the world around you. So rather than looking at a tiny smartphone screen, you can look up at the world and whether you want to watch, you know, a movie on the equivalent of a what, 115-inch screen, or you want to play games with your friends, you can play, you know, ping pong back and forth with your friends. Specs enable you to bring computing into the world around you. So that vision started 12 years ago now that we've been working on Specs, starting with simple camera glasses where you could just take a photo or a video, and initially we just wanted to get the camera out of your pocket, which was really important to us. But as we saw more and more people using augmented reality on Snapchat, probably all the filters as some people call them that you're familiar with, you know, whether you put dog ears on your face, vomit a rainbow or whatever it is, what we saw was that augmented reality was really limited by the phone because it's such a small screen, you have to use your thumbs to interact. That we thought if we could bring augmented reality into the world around you, allow you to use your computer hands-free, right, and in a much more immersive way than this tiny screen, that could really change computing. So, the latest version of Specs just launched, gosh, maybe a month ago now. People are trying them for the first time right here at the Westfield in Century City, which is so cool. I've been going a lot just to check it out and see people experiencing them for the first time.
What excites you about this? Like what is it that is in your brain that makes you so excited about this piece of the business? Like just working on it for so long and seeing it come to fruition.
There are a lot of things that are exciting to me, but I think one of the most important things for me is this notion that, you know, computers have always...
separated us from one another and from the world. So growing up, the way that I experienced that was in the computer lab, which was really the only way to use a computer at the time before smartphones were invented. And so you had to make the choice between going out and playing with your friends at recess or, you know, using a computer. And I really loved computers. So I always felt that there was a sort of trade-off that was forced by computing. And I think the same is true today, right? When you're using your smartphone, you're making a choice to go heads down. And you know, even if when you're at the dinner table with somebody and everyone's, you know, maybe chatting with a friend halfway around the world, but they're, you know, separated from the person right in front of them. And so I think in order for computing to reach its full potential and to be better integrated in our lives, computing needs to enter the world with us and not be just bound by this little screen. And so you can imagine instead of at the dinner table both looking down at a tiny smartphone screen, looking up at each other and playing a game or working on something together, designing maybe one of your new products together in 3D space across the table, that I think vision for computing is really inspiring to me to make it something that's shared, that's grounded in the world around us.
It's so incredible because now I'm thinking about how we would utilize it for Comfort and how businesses can also think about like engaging with one another. There's this vision that you have had over such a long period of time where it wasn't tangible, but you just continuously were building on this idea and just knowing that at a point that you would get there. And it's the same thing that we've done at Comfort, right? And I want to get into culture for a second because your team culture is what matters the most because, you know, we can have this amazing vision for our business but if we don't have culture behind us and community, like we're screwed, it's just going to be us sitting in our room thinking about things. So it's the same thing, you know, when we were building Comfort in the beginning it started with three hoodies in my apartment. I want to actually go into the story of, you know, how Purely White became successful. So, for those of you that don't know, and obviously you know this story, Purely White Deluxe started 11 years ago. I was 19 years old. Started in my mom's basement. I had $1,000. I was ordering shipping labels from Venezuela. I was ordering product boxing from China. I was ordering food grade charcoal powder to brush your teeth with from America. We were making it all in my mom's basement. Was definitely illegal. So, we've changed that since then. You know, it was five years of really no, you know, what looked like no growth, but, you know, there was a lot of like micro steps that we were taking along the way, which then I stumbled upon a content creator that was verified, had a verified gold star on Snapchat. His name was Aiden. And he said, 'Hey man, I'm getting like two million views a day on my Snapchat right now.' You know, he goes, 'I could just throw up a story post and just, you know,' he goes, 'I use your product. Let me just tell everybody that this is what I use to whiten my teeth and I'll put a link up.' And at the time, like truly, we were doing maybe one to two sales every couple days. You know, the business was not really generating any money at all. And I was just so focused on maybe having some type of breakthrough. Snapchat was my breakthrough, truly. And you know, the way that it happened was we thought we literally had someone's account that somehow linked to our Shopify account and we were getting their money. We were like, 'Wait a minute, we made $4,000 today. Like, we don't even know.' And remember, I didn't have a 3PL. So, I was shipping out of my mom's house. So, I was now like, 'What are we going to do with all these orders?' We had like a couple hundred orders. So, we were in the basement, big black garbage bags. We were making all the product. And then we were going and we were like just kind of like waddling up the stairs going to USPS shipping, going back, and then we were like the fulfillment center. Obviously at a point had to shift out of that and get a bigger place. But Snapchat went from zero to 10 million in a year in revenue for the company. And we at our scale had hundreds of people that were making content every single day on Snapchat. And it was, you know, like you said, right, it was so easy to post a photo. But I will say the different piece about Snapchat that I think is different today than any other application we have ever worked on. It's so personable. You are now seeing this person's life through a different lens where you feel like you're friends with them and you get to see them every single day and you get to know, hey, get ready with me. Hey guys, I'm going to the airport. Hey, I'm going to Disney even though Hudson's never been, like all these different places, right? And you get to go experience that through what feels like a very personal relationship that you've built with the creator, which is why we've seen conversions be just so high on Snapchat because it's just a different ideation around content creation, but also the way that you would run an ad, right? Obviously, it was organic back then. We had no paid ads, but it was us paying the creator. They were posting a story. They were saying this is what they use, and that was scaling the business. So that was the first time that I first of all had ever really made, I mean, that amount of money. It was one of these things where I'll never forget my mom walked into my room. I was living with my mom and my mom's like, 'Hudson, what are we going to do this month?' And I said, 'We're going to make like $85,000 this month.' And she goes, 'It's happening now. You actually have to figure out what the [__] you're doing.' I'll never forget it, man. It was like the most insane emotion ever. And you know, back to the vision piece, it's, you know, I started with that and then that went into Comfort and now Comfort is the fastest growing company of all time. And I mean we've seen this incredible shift in, you know, what we're building. I mean we're building community, culture, like we're building this customer base that will, they're the ones dictating what we come out with, like they are the visionaries of my company which is so unique, you know, it doesn't even feel like sometimes it's mine anymore. Or it feels like it's everybody's and I actually enjoy the feeling. So, it is a beautiful story to kind of see where we started to where we are now and how building a team and building a vision and making all those things align can really build something successful and it will be bigger than you at a point.
Yeah. I've been so curious too, you know, right now everyone's talking about creators, right? But you've been working with creators for such a long time. You built your business hand in hand with creators. So like what are some of the big learnings you've had along the way about how to work effectively with creators? I mean we see it in the results all the time, right, when folks are using, you know, creator-led marketing, when they're working, you know, together with creators, that authenticity that you spoke about just leads to, you know, higher view rates, higher conversions. So like what did you learn along the way that helped you, you know, build your business with creators?
So the thing that we looked at right away was they, you know, creators, it's a very interesting profession and industry for them, right? It's growing rapidly. The look back period is very short because this didn't really exist that long ago. It's a very different way to work with creators than the way we do now. A lot of it is commission based, there's not really rates, they have to rely on themselves and the brand and trust the brand that the brand's going to take care of them and build this vision. But I will say, you know, some of the things that we've looked at is they don't want to feel like they're easily replaceable. They want to feel like they're really a part of something. Brand deals have ruined the relationship between the business and the creator because a lot of them are one-off deals. So, it's like, 'Hey, we're going to work with you one time and then you never hear from the company again.' It dilutes the brand actually and it also dilutes the creator because now you have a content creator that's saying, 'Okay, well, I work with like 10 companies this year, but all 10 companies don't work with me now. So, I have all this content that I'm posting. I'm putting all this time and all this energy into this business and they don't even work with me now.' So, they feel very easily replaced. And the Comfort model has been very unique in the aspect of we have around 500 creators. When you start with Comfort, you don't leave because you feel all these, you have this family oriented vibe. You're building product with us. You're going out and you're meeting us in all these different cities. The creators are best friends. You're building this unbelievable culture. And we've noticed that they actually act as the marketing engine for Comfort. In the beginning, it was me tweaking and telling them what I thought would work. But I'm just going off of, you know, what I think is a good idea, but I was never making content for brands before. So, it started with my vision and then it went into, 'Hey, Hudson, I think that these different angles would be amazing, too.' And you start to build this really robust system of how to generate content inside of the business. That's been our biggest lever is they will look at a product before the product comes out and say, 'These are all the ways that we can market it.' And they will say to me, 'Hudson, we understand that there's a problem in the market in this regard. Let's go create a solution together.' For a creator to come and say that to me, that's like what you and I would say to our company is like, 'Let's go look at the market. Let's see what the problem is and let's create a solution.' That's what you're doing with Specs. That's what I'm doing with Comfort through mental health and all these different levers that we're pulling on. But now the creator is saying that. So, you're almost building this like, you're building like chief marketing officers in your company, right? And that's been something that I think is very unique to us. So we took it in the early days. We started with 10 creators that got us to around 50 million a year with Comfort. It was really, it took 10 people because one hook, one really good hook can take your business to almost nine figures. And that's something that a lot of people don't fully understand, right? It's like one really good hook that people are like, 'Fuck.' That was the indication to us of like, 'Okay, we're on to something.' And then you continue to expand and grow on that. But it's the creators that will bring that light to the business that you're like, 'Oh my god, like there's so much more than what we thought we had.' How we think about creators now is, and I'll say this, we're building verticals. I have a home vertical, then I have an apparel vertical, then we're getting into toys. I have a toy vertical, then I have an athleisure vertical and Comfort Core. And I'm building all these different kind of pockets throughout the business where the creators that we bring on to the companies are professionals in that one category. So now there's separate arms to the business and how we angle the business towards growth. So I'm not ever mentioning how much money Comfort makes again because every time I do I get sued. So next year we're looking to double the business. How do we go do that? It's building each different pocket of our business where creators are really good at one thing and they're driving the business and saying we should launch this, we should launch that. So those are the things that we've done to continue to expand on the business.
So much more of a long-term partnership and relationship than like a one-off brand.
Yeah. I mean, we didn't even do contracts with people until like a year ago, you know? We just rely on trust. I only had to do contracts for the legal side of it, but like we have creators now that are still with us. They've been with us for four or five months. We're in the home category. We don't have that many home products yet. So, I didn't want them to be like, you know, I didn't want them to feel like, you know, we're kind of handicapping them with a contract. I was like, wait till we launch it. See how it goes. And they're like, 'We'll sign a contract tomorrow. We love this company.' So, there's a lot of trust there that is being built. And I think that's another thing is you can beat your competitors through trust. You know, if they're ride or die with you no matter what, you know, and they see the vision with you. And that's what we do. Every Thursday we get on a call, we reiterate the vision, where the company's going, what we're doing, how we're doing it, how excited we are, how they play a role, and when they start to see that those are the ways that, you know, we kind of structured the company, it's very easy for them to make a decision to go all in with us. But, you know, one of the things that I wanted to ask is, you know, the version of Evan that started Snapchat to the version of you now. You know, how has that changed? And this kind of goes back to you and I talking in your office the first time where we mentioned like we have to keep reinventing ourselves all the time. So I just want to hear about that version versus this one.
Yeah. I mean it's definitely the most fun part of the job but also the hardest part. I mean, you started your journey at 19. I was 20. And I think, you know, yeah, the Evan today would be unrecognizable to the Evan back then, but maybe more so because of the four kids than the business. So, certainly learned a lot, learned a lot along the way and really had to like push into new parts of myself that frankly were uncomfortable. I mean, I was so uncomfortable with public speaking. I hated it. I was like, you know, I remember our maybe around a hundred team members, you know, our board being like, you know, 'You really need to do an all hands. You need to like communicate with the team.' I'd be like, 'No, it's fine. I'll just send an email,' you know. So, I was like so uncomfortable with that aspect of being a leader. And it took like one of our board members just being like, 'Evan, get over it. Like, it's a part of the job. Yeah. You got to figure it out' to...
learn to love that. And so now, like anytime I'm really struggling with something, I try to just flip that mindset to be like, what would it take for me to love doing this? Like how could I turn this from something that like really bothers me to something I absolutely love and like can't stop doing. And I think that's that sort of like learning mentality that you were talking about that's so important starting a business.
How do you deal with the stress? Like what are the keys to you staying so grounded? Because you could be stressed no matter what size the business. Obviously, we've learned this, but I'm curious like as the business continues to grow for you, like how do you continue to manage just staying in a state of calm?
Well, you know, it's really changed over the years. Like in the early days, I, you know, gosh, I got really into flying helicopters. That was something that like really helped me focus and de-stress. You know, I think that the science basically says what actually helps you reduce stress is a focused activity. Because otherwise, you know, when you're if you're just laying at the...
beach and your brain's all over the place, like that is like actually not a great way to unwind.
