This episode of the My First Million podcast features hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discussing the potential for building new business applications on top of Snapchat’s “Snap Kit” developer platform. They explore the concept of “Cameo Kit,” a hypothetical service that would allow users to purchase personalized video messages from celebrities directly within the Snapchat app.
Topics: Snapchat, Snap Kit, Entrepreneurship, Business Ideas, Monetization, Influencer Marketing, Platform Development
Snapchat’s Developer Strategy [00:15]
Shaan Puri: So Snapchat’s kind of pushing their chips into the middle of the table and saying, “Come build shit on us. Um, we’ll treat you better than those guys will.” And you kind of believe it. You kind of believe it because it’s really their only way to compete with Facebook and Instagram. So they kind of have to actually honor this. Um, so anyways, a quick idea. So in general, I think that being early to these platforms and these app, you know, app ecosystems is a good thing. There’s been several Snap Kit apps that have been like number one and number two on the App Store, so they’ve gotten a shit ton of distribution from it.
Sam Parr: What’s a Snap Kit app?
Shaan Puri: Snap Kit is basically the tool set that Snapchat gives you to build to build stuff. So it’s like, okay, Snap Kit will say, “You want to access their Bitmoji?” Cool. Snap Kit lets you just type one line and you get their Bitmoji character you can do stuff with. Um, Snap Kit lets you use their whole camera with all their lenses.
Inflection Points in Business [01:06]
Sam Parr: I’m doing this course with Gagan and a lot of the a lot of the things we talk about are inflections. So what are what are inflections? And and there’s a a variety of styles of inflections. There’s um technology inflections, which is like basically like, “Oh my god, uh the internet is now in everyone’s house.” That is an inflection. There’s an opportunity there. Or a a belief inflection is like, “Wow, people really don’t trust the media. How can we build to help?” Um, or people are afraid to be in groups of thousands of people. How can we fix that?
Shaan Puri: Um, what we are seeing right now is a uh technology inflection or a platform inflection. It’s really different.
Sam Parr: Platform inflection. Yes.
Shaan Puri: And this is it. This is like when so Pandora, the music company, Tim told me that the company was around for three years and it was doing horrible. And he said, um, they heard about the Apple Store and for some reason, Steve Jobs reached out to them and said, “You guys might be a good like place to put your shit here.” And once that happened, he goes, “Whoa.” And and this I don’t know if it will be, but this is potentially one of those.
Asymmetric Bets [02:11]
Shaan Puri: Yeah, these are asymmetric bets. Uh, sure. Maybe most of the time these platforms either don’t work out or there’s nothing cool to build. Um, and you’ll waste, you know, a month of your time. Or you might get catch a wave early and you might get to the top. So for example, the very first episode of this whole podcast chain is with Suli. Um, and Suli talks about he was working at Microsoft and then he realized he wants to quit and go start a company. He quits, he moves back home with his parents for like two weeks. And the first in the first two weeks, he’s kind of bored. And the day he quit, basically, Facebook did their developer conference and said, “Hey, we’re making Facebook platform. Anyone can build an app on Facebook now.” So he goes home and he’s like, “All right, I don’t know if this is going to be a business. I don’t think so, but he’s like, “I just need to start programming again just to get my, you know, get get the rust off.” And so he builds a Facebook app that was stupid. It was like a superlatives app. Like, “Which of your friends is most likely to end up in jail?” or whatever. Boom, goes viral. Um, you know, he ends up with tens of millions of users and that changed the trajectory of his life where Silicon Valley starts calling him and, you know, Naval flies him out to San Francisco and wants to invest in him and shit like that. So he took a bet on the sort of day the platform launched.
The “Cameo Kit” Idea [03:15]
Shaan Puri: If I’m a, you know, bored developer today or I’m somebody who’s got, you know, the ability to code and, you know, a weekend, I would be building something on top of Snap Kit. Um, the thing I would build is actually so I think what’s hard is when you want to build something that gets the user to leave Snapchat and come to your app. So you kind of have to build something that can actually do the whole experience should just be on Snapchat and it should not um compete with what Snapchat does. So here’s the idea. Okay. Yeah, let’s hear it. I call it Cameo Kit. Um, so basically, I think you could build the app Cameo on top of Snapchat. So you would basically, the Cameo Kit would just say, “Cool, I want to buy a Snapchat from one of these celebrities and um I’ll pay you right here through Snapchat and then I want to send it either to myself or to my friend on my Snapchat list.” So basically, imagine I, it’s your birthday coming up, right? When’s your birthday? It’s in a few days?
Sam Parr: Yeah, you actually bought me a Cameo. You had Gilbert Gottfried call me a dickhead.
Shaan Puri: Right. So I did that last year, but but this year I could do it through Cameo Kit, a little new invention of mine. So basically, I would go in Snapchat, I would open it up, I would see a list of influencers that are that have Snapchat, which is like every celebrity in the world. I would request a video and I’d pay right there and then you would receive a Snapchat from either from me or from them uh in your inbox. And the whole Cameo experience could be built on top of Snapchat without having to have separate websites, separate apps, all that stuff. And you can compete with Cameo very quickly. So I think that’s a very simple idea that could monetize on top of Snap Kit.