Snapchat is an image messaging and multimedia app originally created by three students from Stanford university. After a very slow start, it’s now hit over 10 billion daily video views.

Reggie Brown was talking to his friend and fellow student, Evan Spiegel about pictures he was sending in 2011. “I wish these photos I am sending this girl would disappear,” he said. This gave Spiegel the idea for Snapchat. They started a company with former student, Bobby Murphy. The original name for the site was Picaboo and after launching as a mobile app in July 2011, they amassed a total of 127 users by the end of the summer.

An argument caused Spiegel and Murphy to remove Brown from the company and the two of them relaunched the app with a new name, Snapchat, later that year. It proved incredibly popular with school kids as they could text during class with no evidence of anything being sent. Word of mouth was a significant factor in its growth. They gained 100,000 users by April 2012 and were incurring large server costs. A venture capital firm invested money into the app and as soon as they did, Spiegel dropped out of Stanford just weeks before graduating.

At the end of 2012 they introduced video snaps and overcame a clone of their app created by Facebook called “Poke”. As Poke’s popularity faded, Snapchat’s increased further. By May 203, 150 million snaps were being sent per day. In November, Spiegel reportedly rejected a $3 billion offer for Snapchat from Mark Zuckerberg. It proved to be a wise decision as less than a year later, Snapchat was valued at $10 billion. Rumours of a stock market launch in 2017 could see the company valued as high as $25 billion.