Snap has struggled to gain users since going public

Three months ago, Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. filed for its initial public offering, a milestone move for the now six-year-old ephemeral messaging app. In that report, it revealed some key information about its business: 158 million people use its product everyday and it had over $500 million in losses on $400 million in revenue in 2016. Well, it’s now time for the company’s first ever earnings report as a public company and, uh, it doesn’t look too pretty. It recorded a whopping $2.2 billion loss, in large part due to one-time IPO-related compensation expenses, but the real sore spot is that it only grew its daily active user count by five percent — it now has 166 million people using its app on a daily basis. Still, it did make $149.6 million in its first quarter, which is 286 percent improvement over this time last year.

New tech startups generally don’t have an easy first few months as public companies — the same issue plagued Twitter a few years ago — but Snap Inc. has had a particularly tough start as it goes on an uphill battle against more established social networks. In particular, Facebook has really gone after Snapchat in recent months, as it has integrated the app’s core Stories feature in almost all of its products — there’s WhatApp Status, Instagram Stories, Messenger Day and most recently, Facebook Stories. Indeed, the company recently announced that Instagram Stories has 200 million daily users while WhatsApp Status now has 175 million daily users, both of which are much higher than Snapchat’s numbers.

Developing…