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Founders · 2 min · Apr 12, 2026

A polished college product lost to a rival's counselor distribution

Evan Spiegel and Murphy spent about 18 months polishing a college-admissions product, but their rival already had counselor distribution. He says they learned to get feedback early and plan how a product reaches users.

Evan Spiegel

Evan Spiegel is cofounder and CEO of Snap Inc.

Co-founded Snapchat at Stanford and has led Snap as CEO since 2011, building Stories and the Specs AR glasses.

  • David Senra, Host · Host, Founders

    Has read an entrepreneur's biography every week for Founders since 2016.

About this segment

Evan Spiegel and Murphy spent about 18 months polishing a college-admissions product, but their rival already had counselor distribution. He says they learned to get feedback early and plan how a product reaches users.

From “Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company”, Apr 12, 2026. Watch the full episode

“we had spent all this time building this like perfect piece of software, and we hadn't thought enough about distribution.”
Evan Spiegelat 15:19 · Founders15:19

Takeaways

  1. Their rival reached students through college counselors.
  2. The team spent about 18 months building before getting feedback.
  3. Spiegel learned to treat distribution as part of product strategy.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 37:32AI gives Snap more leverage against its larger rivals4:26
  2. 54:41Premium positioning can fund a hardware company’s advantage3:25
  3. 1:13:00Snap is rebuilding ads around smaller performance-focused customers6:06
  4. 1:41:29Spiegel kept Snap rather than compromise its product vision6:45
  5. 59:07Snap controls hardware where it can shape the customer experience3:38
  6. 1:10:06Snapchat Plus reached 25 million subscribers and a $1B run rate2:49

  7. 14:04A polished college product lost to a rival's counselor distribution2:23

  8. 1:33:43Snap uses open forums to surface problems across the company2:34Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 14:08

    But until I saw how possible it was to build something amazing, like with TextWeb, I think there was like three of us on the team. I, you know, I did the least out of the team members, but the three of us on the team or four of us on the team were actually able to like build and launch a service in India. Right. I was like, wow, like it's actually a lot easier than I thought to build things and to create things that can reach, you know, millions of millions of people.

  2. 14:31

    And so that really inspired me. And simultaneously, I, you know, I had lived across the hall from Bobby, who I ended up starting Peekaboo Snapchat with. And he also, you know, he had a job at the time, too. And we both just loved building things. So we started working on this thing called Future Freshman, which was designed to help people get into college. It was like a total failure, but we had loved working together.

  3. 14:50

    This is an important part. Can you say why? Because I think you took an idea from there for your next business, why it failed. Yeah. I mean, there were a number of reasons why it failed. I think, first of all, we really focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. So, you know, I think we worked for like 18 months to build this perfect, full-featured product, which was like indirect contravention to like how I was always taught to build things, right?

  4. 15:17

    Which is like build a prototype, build an MVP, get in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this like perfect piece of software, and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. And so while we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time called Naviance, which I think still today is probably the leader in like this college application sort of software world, they had secured distribution through all the different college counselors, right?

  5. 15:41

    So like what piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one, you know, from two kids at Stanford? I mean, I think it's a pretty easy, it's a pretty easy choice. So we just saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. And, you know, even if we loved our software, that people weren't going to use it because we didn't really have a skill.

  6. 16:00

    a way to get in people's hands. And so around that time, when we saw the emergence of the app store on iPhone and all this sort of thing, it was very clear that that was a distribution channel that we could really use and benefit from, but that we also needed to build things that we could build quickly, things that we really were going to use together with our friends so that we could be the first early customers. And ultimately, ultimately, Picaboo and Snapchat, you know, represented that. Yeah, because in the book, you talked about