@peterkimfrank Nope, other than we share a name....very different apps and targets. Although I just met Adam through mutual investor contact and he's a good guy with a cool concept...I'm pulling for them.

@bentossell Good question Ben. It's difficult to say how Squad and Snapchat would overlap if Snapchat added group functionality, we'd have to see how they set that up. Right now the user experience is quite distinct from Snapchat. We use 'Snaps for Groups' as a tagline because users get the value and what the app does right away, and in a very succinct and sharable tagline. That's especially critical with our target demo, teens and early 20s. We really see Squad as an evolution or advancement of group texting, which actually hasn't seen a lot of product innovation in a while despite there being countless messaging apps. As for the chat looking like Peach, coincidental as we launched in late November.

@kstalzer Oh I wasn't implying anything by the chat similar to peach :) An interesting use-case for Snapchat I have seen recently is the adoption of tech investors/VCs/Angels etc using it a lot more. @Mazzeo even hosted @Lowercase 'Office Hours' yesterday. As I understood it, Matt started a convo through his story and then individuals got back to him in separate snap-threads. Doing this as a group exercise could be something really cool to experiment with! Teens and early 20s are often quick to adopt and quick to ditch things... so potentially looking at other interesting use-cases could be cool!

@bentossell I was thinking it looks like Peach as well. I'm not certain there is space for so many chat apps between friends..thoughts?

@automateiq @bentossell I think that's the natural inclination of 'our' generation (late 20s and up). But if we as a company have learned nothing else over the last 3 years, it's that the Gen-Z opinion is completely different than ours as it relates to product. What they want to share, with whom, how frequently and with what goal. We constantly have to check ourselves as we build product experience...what we'd want vs what our users want in the experience. It's often very different. To see an example of this, you need to look no further than how many industry and product experts write about how confusing Snapchat's UX is, even to this day despite incredible growth and daily engagement with this demo. Early returns on our data also validate that, particularly return engagement and frequency of posting expiring statuses. It's off the charts, quite literally.

@kstalzer @bentossell You hit the nail on the head, it's all about target demographic and it kills me when people comment who are not part of the demographic or target. What is the age range you are looking for... or who is your ideal?

@dannylowney I think your office will have a lot of fun with it as you get a few people going on it...or so we've been told. You might see a side of your co-workers you hadn't seen before. Disappearing statuses seem to really open people up.

@radiocurea Thanks Adam. As far as lengths go, we hear about equal weighted feedback that the hour is too long, and that the hour is too short. And we also hear from a surprising number of people who like the hour. So our guess is any length will have supporters and detractors. Accordingly, we are exploring more autonomous solutions. For instance one idea is the person who Squad's Up can set the expiration manually (or if they leave it, defaults to the hour). Another idea is you just expire statuses when everyone in the squad sees the post. We still need a fallback default in either scenario. You don't want everyone in the Squad waiting on that one person who doesn't check in as regularly. As for the onboarding friction process, I think still too early to tell. The adage is true that nobody is ever happy with their metrics, even if they are good by comparative standards. So I think we have a lot more testing to do to see what our optimal levels of first time engagement vs Churn are. So we are just collecting data right now.

@kstalzer Thanks for the response. Yes, seems like the activating moment is having that first group experience with some percentage of invited friends responding and/or some number of responses. There are several terminal points: I have no friends using the app, I sent invites but not enough or no one has responded, I invited mostly Android users and don't realize it, I haven't gotten enough responses, the time has expired. Just thinking through how you can optimize the onboarding, since I haven't been able to have conversations yet, even though I really want to, and have invited 15 people. Could be demographic thing, too, FYI: 32 male in the tech industry.