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Comment by ssimoni | Hacker News Reader

It is very nice to have first mover advantage. Many web and mobile application companies today do not have first mover advantage. This was a good talk to listen to if you have quietly stumbled on something that people want before the rest of the product builders find out.

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But they didn't have first mover advantage. There was ping and a few other similar apps on the iOS app store.

WhatsApp focused (correctly) on distribution over several platforms.

BBM had huge potential as well in the early days. Blackberry practically invented this "SMS-alternative" type of chat application. It was being quickly adopted in emerging markets as a replacement for SMS, which was much more expensive. However, Blackberry screwed that up by keeping BBM Blackberry-only for so long. The BBM should have been available on the iOS and Android stores (and probably on Symbian/Java) since 2009 at the latest (basically when Whatsapp was launched), and it would've dominated.

Possibly. On hindsight, RIM totally underestimated the onslaught on mobile started by iOS and later also by Android. They never thought those platforms could take off, so their decision is understandable (but totally wrong of course).

yes of course - because having a random 8 digit hex pin was so user friendly, easy and intuitive :)

What did you do in the very early days to promote the app (apart from Flyertalk)?

heh Flyertalk... awesome forum btw.

until we added messaging nothing I did worked. once we added messaging it took off on its own.

You mentioned in one of your talks about a small loophole in the early days of the App Store where apps were showcased under "new and noteworthy" if one made an update to the app - Q1: is this true?

And Q2: when you say "took off on its own" does it mean folks learned about WhatsApp only from word of mouth with no effort from the WhatsApp team?

Q3: what impact did charging for the app have on the company finances and growth rate?

1. yes, i believe so - of course it was eight years ago.. i think if you submitted new version of the app and changed the name, it would show up under "new" category

2. yes, word of mouth only... but we helped people spread the word by putting "Tell A Friend" functionality into the app :)

3. it helped us pay for office space, salaries and server bills without eating much into VC or angel money we had in our bank account.

Thank you for the answers.

Re #2: I remember hearing about WhatsApp from my friends in 2009 or 2010. They said, "it's basically BBM that lets you communicate with non-Blackberry phones for free." Since those of us who had Blackberries used BBM non-stop, it was a no-brainer to get WhatsApp.

for the cynics who will invariably pile on with "survivorship bias," would you mind sharing what choices you consciously made that were different from other messaging apps?

there were a few and i probably won't be able to list all of them, but here are some:

- build for multiple platforms. most of our competitors did iOS and Android only and called it a day.

- keep the app simple. most of our competitors complicated not only the sign up flow but also the in-app experience

- look native. our thinking was that hundreds of millions of people use native apps thousands times a day and if we use native look and feel in our app, it will feel comfortable and intuitive for our users.

- focus on speed, performance and reliability. it is easy to build an app that sends images quickly on 4G but you also have to work efficiently in the EDGE environments.

- localization. we translated into as many languages as we could as quickly as we could.

- support. for the longest time Brian and myself were the only two guys answering customer support emails.

- focus on organic growth as it makes your network stronger

there are probably a bunch of other things we focused early on that escape me at the moment...

thanks so much! keeping whatsapp simple and focused on replacing SMS/MMS seems like the key differentiator. was there ever internal conflict about making whatsapp more complex or "instagram-y"?

do you mind also sharing what the burn rate per MAU/DAU was around the acquisition?

thanks again!

You covered product decisions pretty well, but I was curious about organizational decisions. Based on your talk, it seems like you existed mostly outside the SV bubble and seemed to maybe even avoid it. Nonetheless, many of your employees came from the network you developed in SV and it seems you were based in SV at the time.

Do you feel that it helped to have started there? Do you feel at this point that you can build a successful company "where you are," given modern tools (AWS, etc.), or does it still help to do your time in SV first?

I remember a few years ago when people bought 10MB. And WhatsApp for a whole week.

In fact, till today, my dad doesn't subscribe for data. He uses WhatsApp on a PAYG basis which would be financial suicide with other apps or browsing the web.

For instance, Skype can eat 1mb+ just by launching it on Windows.

WhatsApp is fast and easy on resources. I know someone who still uses WhatsApp on blackberry bold!

Skype on the other hand takes forever to open and a few more to connect on a 1GB ram phone.

The only time skype beat WhatsApp on speed of launch was when it was baked into the bareboned SMS app on WP.

One area where WhatsApp stands heads above the rest for me is notification. It's timely, and doesnt get lost. Notification counts are accurate unlike skype which always displays (1) pending even if you have 10 new messages - even On desktop.

WhatsApp understands the market better than the rest who mistakenly believe that the rest of the world has similar high, reliable, cheap network speed/ fast devices.

It makes me wonder why they all collect usage, device info, network data... at all.

BBM blew it though. They had huge traction in 2009 and wouldn't let other platforms access it because they were selling a lot of phones and BBM was one way of keeping users tied to their platform.

That's why in 2013, BBM was released on ios and later android. but by then it was too late, they were losing a lot of marketshare.

Have you tried using Telegram? What do you think about it? I don't care about all the security battle that is going on, but I feel that Telegram has more fluent UX.

There were a lot messaging apps before whatsapp so they weren't first. I think the smartest thing they did was use the phone number as the user ID. It really reduced the friction for a lot of people.

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