Teens are going crazy for the Snapchat upgrade

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

This is why you should not spend money on marketing: all of your money should go to improving the product till it reaches the point that your customers are in love with you. The overwhelming majority of money spent on marketing is wasted. The money would be better spent making your product better. The response that Snapchat got is the response every company should strive for.

The level of interest app-makers can command for adding new features is usually limited to a dutiful parroting of the press release on tech blogs. Maybe a mass privacy freakout, if you’re lucky. (Sucks, but at least you know they care!) The bros at Snapchat, however, have lived a pretty blessed life.

So CEO Evan Spiegel probably wasn’t surprised by the Beatlemania response to the new Snapchat, which hadn’t been updated since January. While the rest of us yawned at another attempt to reinvent the texting wheel and perked up at Snapchat’s new “walkie-talkie” video chat function, teens . . . wait where’d that teen go? Oh, there she is. Crawling on the floor. For a smartphone application.

Business Insider interviewed Tracie Schroeder, a high school teacher in Kansas about the mayhem:

Today was the first day in a long time I actually took phones away. I have no idea what all was included in the update, but you would have thought it was crack. They seriously could not keep away from it. I even had one girl crawl under the table with her phone.

At that point I took all the phones away and we had a little reminder chat about when it was appropriate to use your phone and when it was not. Also that it was rarely appropriate to hide under the table.

Post external references

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    http://valleywag.gawker.com/teens-are-literally-crawling-on-the-floor-for-the-new-s-1570838346/+Jessica
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