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WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

fastcompany.com

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Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#131

Post by inthewoods »

ramses0 wrote: post #81
mbesto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you read the article? I did. > as simple as possible to get started with How is that not applying a focus on "user growth"? Just because you're not "growth hacking" or "using a a growth team" doesn't mean you are not implementing a strategy of growth of a user base. Adding a paywall or an advertisement would actively thwart the "simplicity of getting started", and thus halt user growth. My point still stands -…

Please understand some of the details about _HOW_ WhatsApp did what they did. Focusing on reach (ubiquity is an innovation). Focusing on operational efficiency (a low-cost tech company is an innovation). The apocryphal stories about WhatsApp in support of the two above points are: 1) Supporting J2ME clients (ie: dumb-phones) ... connecting "poor people" in dumb-phone countries w/ "rich people" in smart-phone countrie…

>This allowed them to _SCALE_ revenue because they're basically dividing by zero (Income v. Expenses)

Don't disagree with anything you said except scaling revenue. As far as I can tell they never really scaled revenue, but instead became such a threat to FB in terms of users that Zuck felt he had to give up a substantial portion of his company to own them.

Or put another way, if FB (or anyone else) and not bought them, where would they be?

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#132

Post by philliphaydon »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #60
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think he meant within Asia

It's not true within Asia, either. Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Malaysia...WhatsApp isn't #1 is any of those places and neither is WeChat.

I never said anything about WeChat?

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#133

Post by elboru »

rvr_ wrote: post #101

WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons: 1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60) 2) SMS was and still is very expensive here. 3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own. It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or…

Same scenario in Mexico, people in the US didn't leave SMS as fast as us because they had unlimited SMS plans. A lot of people in our countries didn't have that option, we had to pay around 20 US cents per SMS that was just insane

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#134

Post by scorpioxy »

elboru wrote: post #133
rvr_ wrote: post #101

WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons: 1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60) 2) SMS was and still is very expensive here. 3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own. It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or…

Same scenario in Mexico, people in the US didn't leave SMS as fast as us because they had unlimited SMS plans. A lot of people in our countries didn't have that option, we had to pay around 20 US cents per SMS that was just insane

Same in Lebanon and several other countries in the middle east. 15 cents per SMS, now around 9 I believe. So people started using WhatsApp for all their messaging. When audio messages became a feature, people stopped using their phone service and switched to this annoying method of communication. Many people now default to WhatsApp calls for regular calls as well.

When I was there, my monthly bill was over $50 USD per month for very minimal usage of both data and calls. That's ridiculous...

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#135

Post by Ndymium »

avip wrote: post #106
firefoxd wrote: post #87

Here are some numbers i can't find. The number of users chatting on yahoo, aim, facebook, msn messenger, and all the random others combined when it was a thing not to care which people were using. At my job in 2011, every single member of my team was on using a different client, i was on ubuntu using Empathy. The point is, chat was already resolved, and it didn't require some sort of "quiet room or distraction free o…

We hear this rant on every chat-related thread. WhatsApp brought the amazing innovation of using your phone number for "login" (and later on - your native contacts as its contacts list). This enabled zero-BS onboarding, and that's why they have so many users. Thanks WA for helping humanity deprecate that horrible XMPP. I don't miss it.

Funnily enough, the WhatsApp protocol started as XMPP and is now a heavily customized binary version of it I believe.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#137

Post by krrrh »

jacalata wrote: post #114
krrrh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other significant feature added was voice chats. The fact that it's easy to forget or not notice is a strong indicator of how much humanity has adopted text chatting as the primary mode of remote communication.

"Humanity" may be overstating it. In Brazil people very commonly use WhatsApp to send short spoken messages, for instance.

You're right, China too. I should have said asynchronous messaging rather than text messaging. Whether short voice, text, gif, or emoji messages, the synchronous phone call is increasingly secondary.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#138

Post by seppin »

mattbettinson wrote: post #120
rvr_ wrote: post #101

WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons: 1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60) 2) SMS was and still is very expensive here. 3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own. It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or…

I was in Brazil during the WhatsApp ban last summer. It crippled communication, it was fascinating to see.

was there ever a reason give for it?

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#139

Post by robjan »

philliphaydon wrote: post #129
robjan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Hong Kong and close enough to 100% of people use WhatsApp. Most businesses display their WhatApp numbers in their flyers/billboards. Also; every company, sports club, social group has a massive WhatsApp group which they use to keep people updated. It can be quite annoying, to be honest, because everyone is always constantly WhatsApping these groups at every social gathering.

Living in Asia I use nothing but LINE unless dealing with property agents.

Asia is a continent; the biggest, and probably most diverse, continent in the world. Hong Kong was within Asia last time I checked, therefore your assertion that nobody in Asia uses WhatsApp is incorrect.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#140

Post by knodi123 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #103
firefoxd wrote: post #87

Here are some numbers i can't find. The number of users chatting on yahoo, aim, facebook, msn messenger, and all the random others combined when it was a thing not to care which people were using. At my job in 2011, every single member of my team was on using a different client, i was on ubuntu using Empathy. The point is, chat was already resolved, and it didn't require some sort of "quiet room or distraction free o…

WhatsApp didn't replace internet chatting. It replaced (or maybe I should say "disrupted") SMS, and perhaps more importantly, MMS. There are two reasons: it's free, and the UX is far superior in that it mimicks how humans, especially groups of humans, communicate.

> There are two reasons

Three.

For some reason, two of the people I text most will not receive any subsequent group texts as soon as any member of the group includes an image. And two different members of my text circle cannot do group SMS, so group SMS conversations wind up being super confusing. This appears to vary by phone and provider.

Whatsapp works exactly the same for everyone I know, on every device, all the time.

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