Sniply Reaches 100 Million Clicks

Wow—we can hardly believe it! Felt like yesterday when we celebrated our first 100 clicks, yet in the blink of an eye, we’re now celebrating a grand milestone of 100,000,000 clicks. Whenever we pass a major milestone like this, I always try to write a post here to reflect on our progress and share our vision for the future.

Growing a Simple App into a Comprehensive Platform

When Chris, Nigel, and I first started Sniply… it was a dead simple idea. A web app that helps you add a personalized message to the links you share. We quickly learned that app ideas are everywhere and it’s hard to build a real business out of a one-tricky-pony.

It became clear to us very early on that in order to grow Sniply into something noteworthy, we had to expand our product vision far beyond the simple app idea we came up with at the beginning. In order to build a real, sustainable business, we really had to grow our little app into a comprehensive platform.

You hear this all the time, but it’s so true… listen to your users. We’re product developers but not necessarily marketers by trade. The only way we could build a marketing product was by listening to marketers—our users. Building a business is basically helping people solve problems, and fortunately, there are no shortages of problems in the world.

Through chatting with our users, we found all sorts of feature ideas and potential areas for expansion. We used to be a single-feature web app, but now we need an entire features page to house our long list of product offerings.

An Ever Growing App

Over the past year, we’ve added features to allow our users to customize the look and feel of their Sniply messages. We built support for custom domains so you can share links under your own URL. We expanded the original hyperlink call-to-action to include buttons, email capture forms, and all sorts of new CTA types. We worked on building 30+ integrations with popular apps like Hootsuite and Buffer. We built a full-fledged analytics platform and even included the ability to add retargeting pixels to your Sniply links to help enhance your remarketing campaigns. The list really goes on and on!

From talking to and listening to our users, we were able to expand our product vision to tackle more problems and bigger challenges. The solution to these problems became product features, which in turn expanded our once-simple web app into something more. Nowadays, I consider Sniply to be a fairly comprehensive platform, fulfilling a wide variety of marketing needs for users of all shapes and sizes. There’s undoubtedly still a lot of work to be done, but I’m extremely proud of our team for how far we’ve come.

Always Searching for the Next Big Thing

The moment you stand still is the moment you begin to fade away into obscurity. The internet age moves so quickly that 5 years ago, something like Sniply would make absolutely no sense. Likewise, who knows if Sniply will still be relevant 5 years from now. We’ve learned to preserve our curious minds—constantly exploring new problems to solve and keep experimenting.

When we first started Sniply, we knew very little about the content space. Having spent a few years in the industry now, we’ve developed a good measure of market insights. With these insights, we’re able to make more educated guesses for what’s coming next and what the next big thing could be.

One such area is the evolution of content. With the announcements of Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA) and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), the publishing industry is really going through some crazy changes. In response to this industry shift, we at Sniply HQ have been working on a new product: PageFrog.

PageFrog is a product we just launched to help content creators publish and manage content for FBIA and AMP, with support for Snapchat Discover and Apple News coming soon. The first version is designed for WordPress users, so if you’re publishing on WordPress, then you’re in luck! We’ll be working on support for additional platforms in the near future.

In addition to our core work at Sniply, we have plans to build many more free apps and plugins—just like PageFrog—in an effort to continue solving new problems within the content industry as they arise.

Well that’s it—I can’t think of anything else to say! Thanks for listening ???? If you’d like to backtrack on our humble journey so far, here are the posts I wrote for our previous milestones:

Sniply Reaches 50 Million Clicks

Sniply Reaches 10 Million Clicks

Sniply Reaches 1 Million Clicks

Sincerely,
Mike @Sniply