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Comment by urs2102 | Hacker News Reader

> We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability.

Also having only 158 million daily active users up from 150 million in June is definitely interesting and a lot smaller growth jump than I had expected.

Revenue up from $58MM in 2015 to $405MM despite a loss of $515MM last year. Wishing them best of luck, but I wonder how much their competition is hurting their growth (Instagram stories for example)?

Also: > We are not aware of any other company that has completed an initial public offering of non-voting stock on a U.S. stock exchange. We therefore cannot predict the impact our capital structure and the concentrated control by our founders may have on our stock price or our business.

Hmmm... will be interesting...

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158M DAU is not bad, but I would guess they are to some extent limited by the amount of iOS and Android devices in circulation? How are they going to get that number to 300M, or 500M? My best guess is they won't, ever.

Yeah I'm not so surprised by that, as much as I'm surprised by the 8MM user growth from June to now. That's what's seems weird to me. Is that not indicative of a plateau?

I didn't actually read that part. If they only added 8MM DAU from June -> now, then it deserves to tank on its first trading day. Sounds like a decent short actually, once it cools down.

Why would it tank based on numbers available BEFORE it IPO's? I know there are idiots out there but surely the big investors are going to take figures available in the filing into account.

Well, it could go the Facebook route. Remember when FB was going to IPO at $33 a share and then it went up to $38 - it had a P/E ratio of like 100. People could just get excited about Snapchat being the next Facebook, it could go up with initial excitement (not saying all people, but markets are fickle). I guess we'll see what the price per share is.

They are hardly limited by that.

There were over 1 billion active iOS devices globally according Apple Q1 2016 report [1]. Android has even more.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10828134/apple-earnings-re...

Just a few ideas: on iOS, the app requires at least iOS8. I dare bet more than half of those active devices won't be running at least iOS8.

Second, you also won't convert 50% of those iOS users to use one app. Just not going to happen.

Do you honestly see Snapchat growing to 300 or 500 million DAU?

The iPhone 4 is the newest iPhone to not get iOS 8. That's going all the way back to a phone released in 2010, nearly 7 years ago. There are definitely a few out there but I'm not sure it'd be more than half running <= iOS 7, especially when you consider how strong Apple's update numbers are.

In fact, according to a marketing company, as of March last year, only 37% of globally active iPhones were even as old as a 5S [1]. Even the iPhone 4S, which did get iOS 8, was on just 5%.

Even if that data is skewed towards newer phones due to the type of sites they market on, it's unlikely that anywhere near half of active devices are running a software version over three years old.

Also, the App Store offers you the last compatible version of the app if your device isn't up to date, and it's possible that that version of Snapchat is still capable of showing ads, although I don't have one around to test it.

[1] http://www.adweek.com/digital/data-37-of-global-iphone-users...

> you also won't convert 50% of those iOS users

There's more than 1.5 billion Android phones. You don't need 50% of iOS to get to 500M DAU...

> I dare bet more than half of those active devices won't be running at least iOS8.

https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store/

Looks like ~94% of users are on iOS 9 or iOS 10.

Facebook has over a billion mobile DAUs.

There are a lot of reasons that Snapchat might not grow. Lack of people with smartphones isn't one of them. I don't think you have a good understanding of just how ubiquitous iOS and Android devices are.

I once bought a $5 candy bar style feature phone with what appeared to be a 128x128 pixel LCD display, and it came out of the box with Facebook. Facebook is not limited by the number of ultra-high-end smartphones in circulation.

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