I think they were more successful because of marketing. Initially, Privy and Snapchat were fairly close to feature parity. I had never actually heard of them while I was developing Privy. And then about a month or so before I was ready to release Privy, SnapChat hit the TechCrunch lottery. After that they quickly became a media sensation.
Being a side project, Privy wasn't able to compete. Especially after they started picking up funding. Once the Snapchat buzz hit full fever pitch I threw in the towel on development.
I used to think that useful apps could sell themselves. I know a lot of developers have this mentality. Nothing could be further from the truth. I now have much greater respect for the value of good marketing.
This is an incorrect history of Snapchat. Snapchat was a couple of college kids' summer project. It had a couple of thousand of users in the Fall of 2011, but didn't take off until it went viral in a couple of LA high schools.
They raised money in the Spring of 2012, and were still relatively under the radar of most tech publications. It wasn't until the Fall of 2012 that they started getting major buzz.
I'm not disagreeing that marketing can't sway products into success, but that was not the case with Snapchat.
