261–270 of 392 posts
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I've just defaulted back to iMessage for pretty much everything - not an ideal option if you don't mostly talk to people with Apple devices though.
What about groupchat?
Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that's nothing to sneeze at. It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs,…
I'm not really sure Craigslist is a good model here, I feel like their business is getting taken apart vertical by vertical as they fail to keep improving.
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I don’t understand the MBA hate here. The WhatsApp founders don’t have MBAs and sold their company to Facebook for 19 billion. They wanted to be that rich. Nothing to do with MBAs. Also let us be clear. Engineers are no saints either. Case in point Anthony Levandowski of Otto. Orchestrating one of the shadiest acquisitions to make a quick buck. Folks have pointed out below that the issue of growth is not necessarily…
Hold on what is being discussed here has nothing to do with how you sell your business or for how much. We are talking about how loyal customers are treated by business/business people. Whatsapp was sold for that much because many other companies were willing to buy for similiar amounts.
Almost everybody I know has at least 2 messaging apps installed on their phone. What's to stop people start migrating to Signal/Telegram/Viber/Keybase/etc.. once WhatsApp starts displaying ads?
I have friends and family spanning four different countries (U.S. and southeast Asia), so I use WhatsApp, FB Messenger, GroupMe, and WeChat regularly.
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I compared them all at one time. Encrypted by default was a must, the rest were excluded. Signal - Featureless Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption Wire - Really liked Wire, but it had a bug of not doing push notifications correctly. Many missed messages until opening the app manually and seeing them. Viber - No real complaint with Viber I guess, I don't quite remember why I didn't like i…
>Signal - Featureless Come now. Signal has group chats, document sharing, built-in GIF searching (GIPHY), disappearing messages, encrypted calling (video and/or voice), oh and the most important feature: text messaging.
http://archive.is/nRt3x
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I can't think of anything that's for purchase on this planet that is actually cheaper than one freaking dollar per year. If someone can't pay that they're a waste of bandwidth for facebook's ads, since they can't afford to purchase anything at all. If what you say is true Facebook can pull the plug on India completely and save money. I doubt that what you say is true.
Problem is how to collect that dollar. Appstore model will not work. I think they will need to partner with telecoms provider for this.
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I think the context is vital here. In the ideal situation of 5 people hungry and the only shop in town with exactly 5 sandwiches ready, nobody loses: shop sells, people eat, workers get paid. But in this world there are more products and services around than people wanting to buy them, so people have to be convinced, and engineers usually are really poor at lying. A revealing sign that an engineer isn't running that…
> But in this world there are more products and services around than people wanting to buy them, so people have to be convinced Or, the products could shut down, or lower their prices. If there’s no demand, why put energy into making demand rather than making something people want? It’s the lowest bar of achievement in this society; while I understand money can be a powerful motivator, this lowers the value of the en…
Capitalism is, and always has been, about reaching a state where supply exceeds demand. One could argue that once a business reaches that stage, they can put up a Mission Accomplished banner and fire most of their workforce. But because of how wealth is distributed, workers always need to be working so they're incentivized to extend the work and market as long as possible.
The same mechanism is responsible for the situation where institutions tasked with solving a certain problem (crime, cancer, etc.) invariably end up perpetuating the problem so they can continue existing.
You think some shmuck MBA setting up a devious pricing structure at Disneyland is bad? Consider that the US has more empty houses than homeless people, and more unsold cars in lots than people who lack reliable transportation.
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Low single digit percent of 1.5 billion is still tens of millions. Certainly you can make money with that size of a willingly paying customer base.
Ok, but if you’re kicking off those that are unwilling to pay, you’re automatically decreasing the value of your app every time you try to charge people. You can make money — for a time. If the purpose people joined in the first place “I can connect with all the people I know” changes, then you start seeing the growth move in a very negative direction