A VP of engineering at Snap jumped ship earlier this week to work at Tesla — the 10th executive to ghost the social media company since its IPO last year.
Investors share these executives’ skepticism — after struggling to recover from a poorly implemented redesign, Snap’s value has plummeted from $20 to just $11 per share in the last 3 months.
Hoping for a hail mary, Spiegel fumbled the Snap
After Snap’s earnings fell $30m short of their Q3 goal in 2017, CEO Evan Spiegel decided to redesign the app from the ground up — without asking users what they wanted. The changes pissed off everyone from celebrities to your 3rd-grade neighbor, John.
Then, famously famous person, Kylie Jenner, tweeted that the update was “sad” — and lopped $1.3B off of Snap’s market value. The app tanked to the tune of 83% negative reviews — and a petition on Change.org to remove the update with more than 1.2m signatures.
Redesigning a redesign… never a good sign
With no choice but to listen to its millions of angry users, Snapchat rolled out a redesign of its redesign at the start of May — just 5 months after the previous redesign that was supposed to save the company.
Unfortunately for Snapchat, neither redesign was able to stop the financial bleeding — both revenue and user growth failed to hit quarterly goals.