ellie — Relive your Snapchat Stories

@katesegrin when we first launched ellie it was designed to be the mobile app for our website SnapMemories (SnapMemories was a site where we would automatically save the Snapchat stories of people who signed up), so it was simply an archive of your Snapchat Stories. However, soon after launching I spoke with the Snapchat folks and I got a strong feeling that it would be a good idea make sure that the entire value prop of ellie was not dependant on Snapchat (tbh, I just thought they were going to cut off our API access, I did not think they were going to launch Snapchat Memories), so that is why we decided to add social and content creation features. It's only been a few weeks since we have launched these features, but overwhelmingly the most popular feature of ellie remains to be archived Snapchat Stories, and after yesterdays launch of Snapchat Memories (which looks amazing) we have some reevaluating to do. I'm open to any and all ideas from the PH community :)

@jgcatalano @katesegrin I feel the major feature the market hasn't tapped into is the way content is viewed on Snapchat (tap, tap, tap). Snapchat has built the platform on what happens around you and your friends in the last 24 hours. However, there could a number of use cases to which this can be extrapolated: 1. News in shorts? 2. Stories/Comic strips appearing tap by tap (Hooked is doing something similar https://www.producthunt.com/tech...) 3. A video platform of funny content which is interactive (taps/swipes) 4. A bunch of Instagrams photos from one's profile stringed together as a story on the platform (I would use it) This all I could think of for now off the top of my head haha. But there must be many more use cases. Ping me at rahul.ramchand.rr@gmail.com If you'd like to brainstorm. Always fun!

@jgcatalano @katesegrin Man, I know how you feel. In the midst of raising our Series A (circa 2006) for Flurrymail (which was at the time the most popular direct mobile email client), Google launched their Gmail mobile app. Overnight investor interest dried up since they considered the opportunity closed. The good news for us is that Gmail didn't have nearly the market share they do today and there were plenty of other email services that had no mobile apps so we survived. Then, 2 years later we rolled our mobile app platform out to other developers as Flurry Analytics and it exploded. I think the lesson there is that survival can become a competitive advantage if it makes you stronger!

@bentossell not exactly sure at the moment, we are still evaluating all of our options. And when I met with snapchat I was not hoping for an acquisition, I just wanted to meet them.

@jgcatalano thats fair enough ha I'd want to meet them too!