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WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

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Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#281

Post by bryans »

tinus_hn wrote: post #260
rdsubhas wrote: post #249

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long),…

Ultimately though WhatsApp ended up with a billion users and 0 revenue.

Except for that $19 billion exit. Companies don't need to be turning a profit anymore -- they just need to prove they can scale, and someone else will figure out how to monetize it after a buyout. Hell, you don't even need to be a startup aiming for a buyout anymore to get away with being financially incompetent. Reddit is about to file their IPO at a valuation of $10 billion, even though they've been losing money for nearly two decades and are noticeably (and unsuccessfully) scrambling to find any presentable evidence that they're not complete buffoons.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#282

Post by amelius »

Spivak wrote: post #278
amelius wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh yeah, but it was only possible to have such a simple product because they reached mass adoption. Without network effects, you've got to differentiate and thus add complexity to gain users.

But then how did they reach mass adoption in the first place? It’s not like they were a Swiss Army knife and before and stripped features once they got big.

That's a totally different question. A larger company such as Microsoft could have easily grabbed the market first, but they didn't.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#283

Post by [deleted] »

ryanSrich wrote: post #261
rdsubhas wrote: post #249

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long),…

This is why, after being both an engineer and a product manager (and VP of Product), and now a CTO of a seed stage startup, I’m fairly convinced PdMs are unnecessary. At least for the the type of company I’d like to build (WhatsApp as a primary example of that). Off loading the founders vision to someone else is a failure of both communication and org structure (at the seed-SB stage). People may not think hiring thei…

[deleted]

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#284

Post by def_true_false »

rdsubhas wrote: post #249

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long),…

That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any way simpler then having regular account registration, unless you just completely ignore security.

WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop app. The web frontend is still crap. Outsourcing account registration to mobile phone companies is ridiculous (same as Signal) -- in most of the world, it makes it pretty much impossible to preserve your privacy while using WA. Endless nagging about plain text cloud backups makes WA E2E encryption completely worthless, since even if you opt-out, 99% of your contacts will have them enabled.

The impressive part, considering the size of their team, was their backend stuff and scale.

Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC. (Their Android app was laughably bad for the longest time as well.)

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#285

Post by Jensson »

jonasdegendt wrote: post #264
_1 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it $1 per year before Facebook bought them?

I believe so, but wasn't it much like the Winrar license where nobody was actually forced to pay at the end of the day?

It was free for the first year iirc, and then a dollar a year. A dollar a year is way more than needed to cover the cost of hosting, and most would spend that to avoid paying for SMS.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#286

Post by commandlinefan »

M0r13n wrote: post #57

I'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated. For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers. The output is noticeably l…

> efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated

Often inversely correlated...

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#287

Post by netcan »

baktubi wrote: post #225
netcan wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I'm not saying that philosophy is bad, just that reality is complicated. " Scrap the project and move on " works in some contexts, not others. The way startups/products actually work, often, is evolutionary. If your texting idea didn't work, but you see a chance to pivot into something... are you really going to just fire everyone and tell investors "sorry?" That said, the "one thing well" philosophy really do…

Yeah I agree with the idea of pivoting. I suppose to clarify: * Pivoting would leverage existing technology built in the process of initial concept. Which to me is the equivalent of scrapping the initial idea (while salvaging the generally-useful IP/technology). * Adding a bunch of tangential features to a product to increase revenue is a colossal fuckup scenario (maybe the language is a bit over dramatic). For insta…

Again, I don't disagree with you... just think reality makes it messy.

Pivoting via "scrap & salvage" is pretty tough for a startup. The tech behind whatsapp was evidently good, but the IP behind a messaging app is probably not enough to give you an edge. Users are.

Made up scenario: whatsapp loses the SMS replacement game. They have millions of users, but not a billion. Meanwhile, they find that a subset of users like to use whatsapp for dating (or customer support, etc. doesn't matter). They pivot to focus on those customers, and evolve into something else.

This might be a (drama noted) colossal fuckup scenario in an engineering sense. A tractor that you are now converting into a ship.

Evolving is definitely a worse way of engineering than starting with the intention of designing a ship, with neatly defined tonnage, speed and size requirements. Instead, it takes a miracle to implement basic ship features like floating.

Evolving is how a lot of actual software gets invented. Spreadsheets were intended for accountants. They weren't meant to be used as a database, incident report generators, a casual programming environment, or a HR tool. It became those things by evolving.

It happened that way because inventing UIs is hard, and evolving into them happened to work. It's still true that "colossal fuckup scenarios" arise because of this approach. Excel programmer spent decades making excel better at things it's architecture wasn't good at. It's ugly and messy, but life is sometimes ugly and messy.

Flexibility is valuable. Knowing the spec in advance is valuable. Very valuable. They're in conflict with each other to some extent

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#288

Post by Jensson »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #268
rdsubhas wrote: post #249

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long),…

WhatsApp was originally a super simple product. Send and receive messages. It was fundamentally a solved problem. It was all about the fact you could send free messages in a world where sms cost 10 cents a message. It wasn't that their messages were faster, their messages were anything other than free. They had a year fee of $1. Which I never paid yet I used their service anyways. The reason they were able to scale s…

> The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot.

Tell that to Twitter. Whatsapp staying at 50 instead of growing to 5000 is impressive.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#289

Post by bcrosby95 »

dano wrote: post #220

I looked at it this way. The thing most engineers, hero's or not, want to work on is new projects and to build products customers enjoy. The last thing they want to work on is maintenance. In my last personally owned company, small as we were, the engineering team and I documented how things worked as part of what we did every day. We found that by having the inner workings documented so that anyone in the team could…

I must be weird. I love maintenance. The best bugs come out of that. And it's hard to tell if a system was well designed except in hindsight; maintenance programming is the best place to be for that.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#290

Post by numair »

rdsubhas wrote: post #249

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long),…

It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal, that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do, and that’s really all that they did.

I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.

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