Snapchat’s Heavy Hitters: Where Will They Swing Next?

After its wild first day on the public market, Snap Inc., developer of the popular image-sharing app Snapchat, found its market value at 44 percent over its original offering price.

This has left a lot of people much richer than they were last Thursday morning — the most visible of whom may be the app company’s co-founders, CEO Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy, his former Stanford classmate. Both are in their 20s and are on track to be the next heavy hitters in the world of social media. That is — if they know where to swing next.

One day of trading does not a legacy make. The boy billionaires know this.

One day of trading does not a legacy make, of course. The boy billionaires know this, and have said the whirlwind IPO is just a momentary fireworks display, while the challenge moving forward is developing the brand. According to Speigel in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “We’d rather inspire creation because we know a derivative of that is growth.”

In other words, profit isn’t a machine that winds its own springs — creativity is. Snapchat’s continuing challenge will be capitalizing on the creativity and engagement of its user base to spur growth, not the other way around.

The flood of attention to the app invites easy comparison to the biggest giant of the social media world, Facebook, and its controversial founder Mark Zuckerberg. The constant self-reinvention that has marked Facebook’s long-standing dominance of the social media playing field seems to be on Spiegel and Murphy’s minds: Snap’s IPO prospectus and mission statement calls it a “camera company” and specifically claims its goal is “reinventing the camera” as a tool of social connectivity and self-expression.

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This is a lofty goal, but one Snap might need to reach to maintain its momentum amid questions about the stability of the company in the face of some major doubts. Perhaps the company’s directors realize that if Facebook is a better role model to follow than stagnant predecessors like MySpace, then Snapchat needs to become more than a smartphone app that lets people share funny pictures. Social media trends don’t last forever and app developers must increasingly get out ahead of their users, predicting trends before they begin and abandoning them before they grow old.

Rather than encouraging people to seek socialization through social media, Snapchat might instead encourage people to go out and connect in the real world.

What does this mean for Snap Inc. and the Snapchat app? Time will tell, but this seems like an important moment of flux in the company, as well as for its users and recently broadened base of shareholders.

If Spiegel and Murphy’s vision comes to pass, it could mean a trend toward the ephemeral style of sharing that Snapchat has brought to the table in lieu of Facebook’s indefinite data storage and cataloguing. Spiegel’s message of hope is that rather than encouraging people to seek socialization through social media, a la Facebook, it might instead encourage people to go out and connect in the real world, using media as a way to enhance these connections.

That would certainly be a way for the company to present itself as fresh and new in this computerized world. It would make Snapchat far more beneficial to average consumers, who are tired of being sucked into the endless vortex of regular social media platforms that keep them behind a screen.

It would also likely be the best way for the young co-founders to dethrone Mark Zuckerberg as the king of social media and the tech world.

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And if not: Well, there’s plenty of room for outdated apps in the recycle bin. Snap’s IPO success has given its founders an enormous opportunity to grow the flagship app, but only time and market value will tell whether Thursday’s success was deserved.