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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

#401

Post by AussieWog93 »

twotwotwo03 wrote: post #393
ryanSrich wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can attest Product Managers were the downfall of one startup I worked at. The company had dozens of millions in funding and managed to piss it all away with ill-founded escapades driven by a handful of Product Managers. If anything, the Product Managers seemed to be managing their careers, not the product. They babied engineers until most of the engineers stopped caring about the product and just gave up working ha…

On the flip side, my old PM had an incredibly deep understanding of both the product and the customers buying it (an area in which us SWEs were lacking), in addition to a semi-hands-on understanding of the engineering process too.

He wasn't a professional software engineer, but he took the time to actually learn how to program through some side projects and through this gained a real understanding of what would be trivial for us to implement and what wouldn't.

To top it all off, he had good rapport with the CEO and was adept at managing upwards.

The product wouldn't be half as good as it was if not for him.

Rather than tarring an entire profession with the same brush, I think a much fairer "warning" to founders is to make sure the people you're hiring are competent and that the job they are doing is something that actually adds value to the organisation. PMs, when deployed appropriately, can be worth their weight in gold.

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

#402

Post by giantrobot »

908B64B197 wrote: post #373
numair wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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. I remember selling every BlackBerry stock I had when I got my hands on their touchscreen phone (the Storm was it?). 3 years behind the…

There's a number of stories about the insane level of hubris at RIM. Before the iPhone smartphones were seen as "business" phones. RIM reportedly felt like hot shit because they had managed to just not fuck up while Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia tripped over themselves to try to make a BlackBerry But Better.

RIM was so focused on the "business" market they really couldn't conceive of a real consumer device. Their upper management apparently looked at the billions of feature phones sold (IIRC Motorola had sold a quarter billion RAZRs by then) and said "nah let's double down on the order of magnitude smaller business market". They dipped their toe in feature phones with the Pearl but it was a joke compared to the original iPhone with its original software that didn't even support MMS.

By starting with more consumer friendly features (Web, media player, phone features) Apple had an extremely competent baseline of functionality. As soon as they added workable Exchange integration (iOS 3 or 4?) the iPhone (including older models) instantly became workable business devices. RIM had far more ground to make up for going from business to consumer than Apple had going consumer to business.

https://archiveprod.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/how...

https://techland.time.com/2013/09/29/the-inside-story-of-the...

https://sites.psu.edu/global/2018/02/09/blackberry-and-the-i...

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

#403

Post by dnautics »

pessimizer wrote: post #375
def_true_false wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Whatsapp:Erlang as Discord:Elixir. The effectiveness of the teams might more be the effectiveness of OTP/BEAM for network applications.

almost certainly part of it but not the whole story.

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

#404

Post by jokethrowaway »

While what you says about focus is important, I've seen plenty of focused startups die.

WhatsApp had success because they executed well enough at the right time.

I hate WhatsApp with passion because of its limits and that horrible web interface that needs your phone connected in order to work.

I know plenty of people (me included) who stopped talking with some groups of people because they didn't tolerate WhatsApp.

It's mediocre software at best, but because of the network effect and first mover advantage, that was enough.

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

#405

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #399
Griffinsauce wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, how does this connect with why Whatsapp won as an app? Consumers didn't follow this logic. At all. They went for the convenient and free option. I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.

>I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me. You talked about encryption on HN. What do you expect? Might as well have brought up gun control at a Republican rally. (Not that you were anything but 100% right. The general public didn't care about encryption at all until the Snowden leaks.)

They still don't!

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

#406

Post by jokethrowaway »

Jensson wrote: post #288
that_guy_iain wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's unfair, Twitter had to wrestle scaling with Rails while WhatsApp used Erlang which is a perfect match for scalable communications.

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

#407

Post by saghm »

abduhl wrote: post #343
amelius wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This comment flies in the face of actual history. While your point about Microsoft may be right (who knows with how they’ve ruined their messaging platforms?) it certainly doesn’t hold true for iMessage which came out in roughly the same timeframe as WhatsApp (2011 vs 2009).

iMessage still has yet to come to other platforms, and at least for a few years after the iPhone's launch, many people viewed it as a luxury product and were unlikely to spend the money to get one compared to cheaper phones (which WhatsApp supported).

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

#408

Post by AussieWog93 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #405
AussieWog93 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me. You talked about encryption on HN. What do you expect? Might as well have brought up gun control at a Republican rally. (Not that you were anything but 100% right. The general public didn't care about encryption at all until the Snowden leaks.)

They still don't!

I think that depends on how you define "general public". My mum doesn't, but my (far more digitally savvy) teenage cousin does.

Back in 2009, though, this was a very different story. Even tech-savvy people didn't care.

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

#409

Post by toast0 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #383
toast0 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And what I’m getting to is that yes, they had 50 engineers in their pay roll, but many more supporting various SaaS products and infrastructure they use and pay for. I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019. Hardware was outsourced to SoftLayer, of course. I think they had a sizable operation, but if you move that in house, you've got a team of 4ish for 24x7 colo work (we were only in one location for an embarassing amo…

I hope I didn't come across as though I was criticizing at all. I meant to point out that having 50 engineers build something today means something different than it would have a decade ago, although in retrospect my age/career are getting away from me and 15-20 years ago would have been a much better example. I should emphasize that the accomplishment is incredible, regardless of how much we outsource things today.…

No offense was taken.

I mean, honestly the way we built WhatsApp 10 years ago is pretty similar to how we would have built it 20 years ago... except that we'd probably have had to move towards dedicated colo space, instead of 'managed hosting' bare metal. I think we may have ended up going that way if we didn't get acquired and move into FB datacenters.

SMS aggregators were certainly around in 2000, just as well as in 2010 and 2020 ... although they've got fancier webpages now.

I mean, you can outsource a bunch of stuff, but we just didn't use very much. You can't outsource the core product and deliver reliability, and we didn't have much that isn't the core product. SMS verification was only reliable (ish) because we used several providers with real time statistics guiding the choice. (Of course, some of the providers use the other providers, so it's very messy)

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

#410

Post by Closi »

ryandrake wrote: post #291
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),…

I've always called this Feature Cram, and it's standard procedure at basically every company I've ever worked, small and large, B2B or B2C. Nobody is willing to say "Our software is a success and it's done . Let's fix the major bugs, put it into maintenance mode and start a new, separate, great idea!" Nope, instead it's always "OK the MVP is going well. Let's jam ten other unrelated things into it and see what takes…

Yes, although there is a balance - lest we forget that you couldn’t use WhatsApp on your computer unless your phone was turned on until a month ago, and there is still no iPad app.

I think WhatsApp is in the place where it is so ubiquitous in some social circles that it faces less competitive pressures than other apps and can afford some of these pretty large gaps.

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