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Brown chronicles how Instagram (owned by Facebook) copied Snapchat's Stories feature and decimated Snapchat's growth. Evan Spiegel rejected Facebook's $3B acquisition offer, and Facebook responded by cloning every feature Spiegel created.
Canon
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Brown frames Snapchat's story as a return-on-luck failure: Spiegel created a brilliant feature (luck favored him), but Snapchat lacked the platform scale, advertiser relationships, and international distribution to sustain the advantage. When Instagram copied Stories, Snapchat's luck couldn't be converted into durable returns.
Highlights
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Instagram Stories is the most successful product copy in tech history — it replicated Snapchat's core feature and had more daily users within 8 months
Brown details how Facebook launched Instagram Stories in August 2016 as a direct copy of Snapchat Stories. By April 2017, Instagram Stories had 200M daily users vs Snapchat's 166M. The feature that defined Snapchat became Instagram's growth engine.