Snapchat CEO: Why distribution has become the most important moat | Evan Spiegel

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You guys have a billion monthly active users. Why is it so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting, social consumer product?

**Evan Spiegel** (0:08)
So much of consumer technology focuses on product market fit. People don't spend nearly enough time thinking about distribution and figuring out distribution.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:16)
I feel like Snap has always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team. Stories, AR glasses, swipe-based navigation.

**Evan Spiegel** (0:24)
We have a very, very small design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. Your first day that you join the design team, you present work. You're making things. If you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
People copy you. As a human, how does it feel just to see this consistently happen?

**Evan Spiegel** (0:38)
Fifteen years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a moat, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:44)
You described this coming year as the crucible moment.

**Evan Spiegel** (0:47)
It's a real turning point. We're in an industry where so much of the conversation is focused on technology. Humanity is far more important because humanity dictates how technology is adopted. New technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt new technology as it comes out. There's going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming with AI.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:10)
Today, my guest is Evan Spiegel, CEO and co-founder of Snap. Evan is one of the very few humans in the world who has successfully built and scaled a lasting consumer social app. In the 15 years since Snapchat launched, there are essentially zero social consumer apps that have launched and stuck around. Snapchat has over 1 billion monthly active users, is generating over $6 billion a year in revenue, people post over 8 billion AR lens photos a day on Snapchat. Over the years, Evan and his team have invented the concept of stories, they had the first AR glasses product in the market, they invented swipe-based navigation, the camera being primary, and also back in the day, face swapping, making people look older, and so many of the things that are just copied throughout the entire industry.
If this is truly the golden age of consumer products, like many people say AI is going to enable, there's a lot that we can learn about how Evan and his team think and operate and are able to continue innovating. This is a rare podcast interview with Evan and we cover a lot of ground. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a year free of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Evan Spiegel.
Evan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Evan Spiegel** (2:35)
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:38)
I want to start with just trying to understand and help people understand, why is it so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting consumer product and in particular, a social consumer product? And just to give people this context, I don't think people realize this, but since you launched 15 years ago, there's basically TikTok, which is not really social, it's more like a media platform, I'd say, and then maybe threads, which I think is cheating because it just sits on top of Instagram. Basically, nothing else has worked other than Snapchat 15 years ago. And in spite of everyone just, like everyone innately just wants to build a consumer product, social app, it's just like where everyone first goes, everybody fails. Nothing works.
Why is it so hard? What do you think people don't get?

**Evan Spiegel** (3:21)
Well, I think it's really interesting in terms of the examples that you just shared of TikTok and threads, because you just shared two examples of people who figured out distribution. And I think that that's actually one of the hardest things to figure out in consumer technology today. We were so fortunate when we created Snapchat, the mobile phone in the app store were just getting started. So people were downloading lots of new apps all the time. They were really excited about trying new services. Instagram, I think it started a year before Snapchat or something like that. So there was a real appetite to try new apps and new services. And that's not the case today. It's a lot harder to get distribution for new ideas and new services. People aren't downloading as many apps now as they used to. And both TikTok and Threads figured out distribution, which is why I think there are more recent examples of success. TikTok did it with money, which I actually thought was really innovative. They spend billions of dollars subsidizing both sides of their video marketplace, acquiring customers to watch videos and then paying creators to make videos. So they were able to bootstrap their ecosystem. And I think with Threads, obviously, they were able to leverage the amazing distribution that Meta has across all their other products. So I think so much of consumer technology focuses on, am I building the right product? Do I have product market fit? Have I built something that's really going to resonate with customers that they're really going to want to use all the time? And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about distribution and figuring out distribution. And that seems to me to be a huge differentiator. So as I reflect on the early days of building Snapchat, the thing that we figured out in terms of distribution, especially when it comes to social, was that back then, people believed that there were network effects in social networks that meant that the more people you had using the service, the stickier that it is.