Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

$3.5B for an app lots of developers could create over the weekend is absolutely incredible. It also has absolutely no income, and very little avenue for actually gaining any. I don't know what they're doing to need seed money, I can only imagine that the service runs itself outside of tweaking EC2 instance sizes.

View on HN

It doesn't run on EC2. It runs on Google App Engine:

  xyzzy:~ harryh$ host www.snapchat.com
  www.snapchat.com is an alias for ghs.google.com.
  ghs.google.com is an alias for ghs.l.google.com.
  ghs.l.google.com has address 74.125.29.121
  ghs.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:400d:c04::79

Is it just me, or does this finally scream 'bubble'?

People have been screaming bubble for years now. Facebook's IPO was a "bubble." Instagram's aquisition was a "bubble." Pinterest is a "bubble." While we all conveniently ignore that most startups today are generating real revenue and firms like a16z are massively scaling back funding to early stage consumer startups, I hardly think one "bad apple" (if it is, maybe they will come up with some crazy way to make revenue, I'm not a psychic) is a sign of a bubble.

I largely agree with this, it seems the only area where valuations are getting really crazy are in the app market. I assume the only real plan they could have is acquisition, and even then I really only see Facebook taking that dive.

Facebook have already cloned it.

https://itunes.apple.com/app/facebook-poke/id588594730

and failed badly...

here's an idea: every "n"th image, snap an advertisement to a user. sounds like revenue potential to me.

I imagine a lot of users would just leave for the next big thing or a clone of SnapChat.

Or be like "Fuckers!" and then enjoy the next 19 real SnapChat messages/videos, etc.. and then be like "Fuckers!" ...

Seems to work well enough for Spotify.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com