WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
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 office" to get it where it was.
Kudos to the WhatsApp team for having this many users, but let's not forget that we had no problem chatting until the facebook, yahoo, googles broke the old protocol in favor of restricting users to their own systems.
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.
If they were so great it would have caught on in the US, but it didn’t.
Back on topic, I've avoided using WhatsApp for about a year, even though everyone around me was using it. When I've finally gave in I found out that it was really, really easy to use, even on my relatively crappy iPhone4 (I'm talking about ~2014-2015, at which point that type of phone was seen as a museum artifact; I'm still using it). Sending photos was damn easy, notifications were always "right" (not the crappy shit that Skype calls "notifications") and the "last seen" future was the central point of many personal relationships (still is). Unfortunately WhatsApp stopped functioning for me about one year and a half ago (after the FB acquisition), but you can't dismiss it just because it hasn't caught up in the States.
The US is not at the centre of the world.
This persists today - every single person I communicate with uses a completely different app, including SMS and email. I only know one person who uses WhatsApp, but serval have dumbphones.
Coordinating with more than one person involves at least 2 chat programs and a website. "Group chats" are impossible because in 2017 we still can't group chat between 1 person on Skype, 1 SMS, and a Facebook.
It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or how old, no matter if it is a rich kid with the latest IPhone or the poor with the cheapest phone. Even the telcos had to bend to WhatsApp strength by offering "unlimited WhatsApp usage" on very limited data plans.
> Nokia terminated its support of software development and maintenance for Symbian with effect from 1 January 2014, thereafter refusing to publish new or changed Symbian applications or content in the Nokia Store and terminating its 'Symbian Signed' program for software certification. (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/18502_New_Symbian_a...)
1) Internet providers must not log any information about users traffic, except information related to the network access itself (like the IPv4 dynamic address attributed to the user's modem)
2) Application providers must log all actions performed by its users and retain for at least 6 months.
3) Any judge can request to an application owner the complete access log of anybody.
4) If the company does not comply to the request it can be fined up to 10% of its local revenue; face temporary or permanent shutdown.
WhatsApp ignored the law for two times and a 1st instance judge ordered the temporary ban to be performed by the major network providers. In both cases the order was latter revoked by 2nd instance judges.
Keep in mind that our "Internet law" was praised by everybody, including the international community, for its explicit creation of rules for internet neutrality. Turns out that the price for internet neutrality was mandatory massive surveillance
[1]: PT-BR source: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2011-2014/2014/lei/...
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...
And they succeeded. I've been using it for years and the only new feature I remember is end to end encryption, despite they probably added new features. I don't care about status and stories, if they're still there they managed not to make them in the way of people that only want a SMS alternative. This is great design.
My only wish is that they stay using the very same chatbot backend of Messenger. WhatsApp is the only major chart platform without chatbots and given it's the number one in many countries, included mine, I'm a little tired to tell customers, yes but your customers will have to use Messenger or Telegram (which many people don't even know to exist.)
Here in India, the term 'whatsapp' has creeped its way into regular hinglish (mix of hindi and english) that most working professionals speak in. All schools, colleges, offices and even parents use WhatsApp groups to communicate. It has simply been embraced as the default place to communicate. Even drivers and servants on my contact list put up WhatsApp stories and send broadcasts; the intuitiveness of its adoption truly amazes me!
Whatsapp probably has about 220 million users in India[1] and also because of dwindling mobile data prices, it also has now become the alternate voice channel [2]. Also I read that 90% of all smart phones in India have Whatsapp installed.
(1) http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/whatsapp-hits-... (2) https://www.medianama.com/2017/05/223-indian-whatsapp-users-...
WhapsApp could probably monetize there by tacking on a payments system, possible a bit paypal like. Could make money and not annoy existing users much beyond an extra button they don't use.
not saying it's necessarily better than cards, since it came out of necessity when POS terminals are not as widespread as in west, but it's interesting alternative
What is deeply regrettable is the fact that they ended up selling to Facebook and thereby contributing to Facebook's aggressive and relentless mass surveillance system.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-t...
edit: Closer and better quote. Thiel's paraphrase of Zuckerburg, "I don't know what I could do with the money. I'd just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have."
[2] https://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg...
However, Facebook had 400MM largely North American and European users and had $1-1.5BB revenue with obvious potential for much more. WhatsApp's revenue was a couple orders of magnitude less after five years, with lower potential on its own to grow since it lacked Facebook's ability to collect and exploit data.
So, it seems like WhatsApp should be valued less than Facebook, i.e. less than $20BB, at the same stage in its life. That doesn't mean Facebook overpaid; WhatsApp's users were nearly a perfect complement to Facebook's geographically and Facebook, unlike a company like Google, had the organizational ability to allow WhatsApp to grow while benefitting from Facebook resources.
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/tracking-facebooks-v...
What if it failed?
A bird in the hand is worth more than 2 in the bush.
I've started seeing cracks in WhatsApp's UI:
- Some times when inserting a single emoji on a single line, in between pressing send and the message being sent, the keyboard flickers.
- There seems to be a mysterious space between the Euro symbol and the next character...? That space isn't displayed on the webapp.
- I had a third one that I forgot.
Also bad decisions:
- Logs shouldn't be backed-up to Google Drive.
- Bloat. "Status"? No one cares. Why does swiping left allows me to take pictures? I have a camera app that I like using.
- Sharing metadata with Facebook will be WhatsApp's undoing, mark my words.
Signal on the other hand is being developed by 1 guy and has 5M installs.
It pains me to say this, but almost nobody cares. Many people don't even know that Facebook owns WhatsApp. Most people don't care about how privacy-intrusive Messenger (or whatever Facebook's chat app is called nowadays) is, and WhatsApp is less intrusive than that (at least the data is e2e encrypted). I don't see any undoing in sight, unless the competition steps its game up a whole lot.
Due to network effects, competitors can't really have a big impact on reducing WhatsApp usage unless something scandalous and hugely worrisome (to the general public) happens with WhatsApp, which then causes many people to ditch it.
I don't use WhatsApp because it's owned by Facebook. So my following comments here should be taken with a pinch of salt. Telegram, which I do use, has been on a rapid pace of development for at least a few years now. If I had to guess, I'd say that Telegram likely provides a much faster, better and richer experience compared to WhatsApp. Just a few features that come to my mind on Telegram that I like and value - username (no need to reveal one's phone number to others), @replies to tag users, cross platform/OS and cross device sync, great search (global as well as within a conversation), and message editing and deletion after sending. Telegram also has bots, money transfer and other features. I'm aware of the comparative security related weaknesses in Telegram, but other ones (like Signal and Wire, more so Signal) that are better on the security front have a long way to go to catch up with Telegram on reliability, features and UX.
The one issue I have with Telegram is that starting at least six months ago there can be a huge delay in message delivery. Sometimes easily half an hour after a message was sent. Does anyone else have this experience?
Only thing I can think of other than Telegram just getting worse in this regard is that perhaps they 'punished' me because I've been experimenting with bots. It's almost enough to make me stop using it though, as push (or near-instant) message delivery is rather important...
I haven't experienced such long delays with Telegram. It takes a few seconds, though I will admit that message delivery seems to have slowed down compared to how it was a few years ago.
I really didn't care either. Then we went on a family vacation and instead of sending pictures to everybody all the time, I put a couple on my status every other day and told people if they're interested, they can look there.
I must admit it was a fun experience watching people check them out (you can see who looks at your status) and a few fun conversations started through it. Definitely a better option than firehose blasting everybody with your vacation pictures directly. (Hardly anybody in even my extended family uses facebook, btw.)
As for swiping left: That's just the alternative mode for tab switching, swiping right gets you to "status". I agree that it doesn't need a camera tab, though.
Otherwise the comm's platform will just degenerate into shitposting, memes, and politics. Make it easier / more natural to share "real" pictures, not meme-y text.
You'll see it "universally" in all their apps... each done slightly differently to account for differing user-base habits, but the core idea is the same... suck oxygen from competitors, and push forward with tools for OC and not reposts (original content, aka: real-user-sharing).
Starting a new conversation is done with an unlabeled FAB on the main-screen. She had no idea that that was even a button.
Then there's four tabs across the top. One for taking pictures, because the Camera-App and the camera-shortcut in the conversation view apparently weren't enough, one for actual chats, one for setting your status, because that's clearly a similar action to chatting and should therefore be placed in a tab next to it, and one for calls, no idea why that's not just a button in the contacts list.
Then when you go into the conversation view, at the bottom you have a generic attach media icon, a take-picture-and-send-it-shortcut and then separate from that the send-voice-message button, sharing its place with the actual send-message button. That might've been clever design at some point in the past, but now you have those other buttons right next to the send-voice-message button, so it should share the look with those as it does a very similar thing.
Also, the unlabeled movie-camera-icon at the top does not mean sending a video, it means starting a video call. You could sort of guess that by the location of that button, but that's still not just obvious, especially not for my mum.
Where you can however now send videos from, is the Emoji-selector. Or well, it's rather GIFs. Reaction-GIFs, even. Which is why I'm not completely opposed to them having placed it there instead of in the attach-media-dialog, but now you have 9 tabs at the top of the Emoji-selector and three tabs at the bottom (also including the search), as well as a delete-key, which does not behave like a tab. And two of these tabs even share the same icon.
Moving on, when you mark a message for selection, you get 5 icons at the top. Two of those are the exact same arrow-icon just mirrored. One means "Reply", the other means "Forward". Even knowing that there's a difference, I couldn't tell you which one means which without first long-pressing on them, which my mum won't know to do.
Also, one of those 5 icons is a star and when you long-press on it, it literally says "Star". Not "Favourite", not "Remind me", not "Mark as Important". I don't even know what it does myself, so I can't tell you what it should say there.
Some of these problems are hard to avoid or hard to get right, but many of these are there, because they absolutely did not focus on being a chat application and instead had to turn the whole thing into everything and the kitchen sink, and then they're even making the individual features compete for a spot in the directly visible GUI, no matter how much it clutters things up, just because they want people to use them.
The app is quite streamlined, especially compared to other apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype. I think if you were to remove any of the main features at this point, people would complain and jump ship to another app.
I would like to hear from devs who aren't interested in expanding for the sake of expanding, who still consider their apps to be very successful.
If I have a B2B tool and it's fairly niche I might only need 100-200 clients but I charge them more :)
Seems like the evidence of WhatsApp itself, not to mention my own experience, is directly contradictory to this.
A video is rarely preferable to an image, and an image is rarely preferable to a bit of text.
Note, this should not discredit the more interesting and glorified aspects of WhatsApp (strong leadership, technical aptitude, tech stack, etc).
Did they burn through lots of money?
> no immediate pressure to turn _any_ revenue/profit
Didn't some people pay for it?
https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/dealbook/2014/10/28/faceboo...
https://blog.whatsapp.com/615/Making-WhatsApp-free-and-more-...
https://www.imore.com/whatsapp-moves-yearly-subscription-pay...
My understanding is that the annual fee was essentially nonexistent, honored far more on the breach than in the observance, though all I know for sure is that they never charged me.
IIRC they were always free in emerging markets like India though.
Given that they have extremely little metadata too, I actually wonder if they have any revenue stream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs
Here is Jamshid Mahdavi talking about their stack as well but focusing on development, testing and shipping code. Some of the stuff they do will surprise you if you've been at a shop with a large QA team and deployment pipelines with many stages.
Where are you getting this from? Whatsapp was a very lean shop _because_ they had very little capital to work with. Even after Sequoia came along, they sailed a tight ship.
"But while Facebook has long prided itself on the way its growth team has turned attracting new members into a science, Koum is equally proud of the fact that WhatsApp has not done so. Instead, all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to get started with—it doesn’t even require you to create a user name or password—and so useful that you’ll tell friends and family about it."
And that's consistent with what I've read of their pre-FB approach. During that period, they definitely didn't have an unlimited amount of capital. They got to 250m users (as of June 2013) [1] on only $8.3 million [2].
So no, I don't think this does a disservice. Especially when you compare it with things like Juicero, which rode a wave of hype into a $120m failure (14.5x what WhatsApp spent). Hype can get you money, but unless you focus intensely on user experience and user value you won't build the audience you need to succeed.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/2614/monthly-active-whatsapp-...
[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp/funding-rou...
Which is a very interesting and rare example of prioritising one aspect of UX by completely sacrificing another.
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 - most businesses who didn't have the type of capital backing that WhatsApp has would be insolvent or have to actively cause friction in their sign-up process to remain solvent (and hence halt user growth).
> Especially when you compare it with things like Juicero, which rode a wave of hype into a $120m failure
No one was comparing it to Juicero...I have no idea how that's in any way relevant...
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 countries (for $0.99 app).
$0.99 / user * 25% of your userbase isn't enough revenue for most companies to be successful.
2) Be operationally efficient, reliable, and lean. How? By running like 10 erlang servers (targeting peak message transmission RATES, not all-time storage of messages or number of users)
This allowed them to _SCALE_ revenue because they're basically dividing by zero (Income v. Expenses) if they're extremely lean on number of employees, maintenance, and operations costs.
Therefore: it compares extremely well to Juicero as a counter-example.
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?
I also RTFA, and it's hard to understand how someone could think user growth wasn't the focus.
— "…all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to get started with…" [Hint: They did this to improve virality.]
— "All along, he adds, the company's goal has been 'getting every single smartphone user on our network and getting them to use WhatsApp.'"
Plus, they'd said as much elsewhere as well. From https://www.wired.com/2016/01/whatsapp-is-nearing-a-billion-...:
— "Continued growth, it turns out, was one of the main reasons Koum agreed to the Facebook acquisition. The deal allowed WhatsApp to concentrate on growth without worrying too much about revenue."
As an example, look at Google in the early days. They were mainly focused on making a great, valuable product. Growth was a consequence of that. In contrast, look at all the people that glued gamification, growth hacking, etc, onto mediocre mediocre products. As with things like MLMs, a growth-first focus can get business results, but I think it's a very different mindset than, "Let's make a product people love."
Growth is surely a useful metric for them, and from that quote, it looks like it's a goal. But a goal is different, broader thing than what one focuses on. Compare people who want to be, say, great athletes (and therefore famous) with people who just want to be famous. The former will focus on doing the hard work; the latter will be more inclined to chase self-promotion and attention directly.
> the company announced that 250 million people—a quarter of all members—were using it daily
Just had a quick look, and I have around 150 contacts on WhatsApp (mainly the Snapchat/Instagram users age group) and not a single person has set one of these photo statuses right now. I only ever recall seeing one once, since the feature launched.
If I open up Snapchat/Instagram I will literally see hundreds. Unless it's become very popular within a certain country, or another age group I find it hard to believe that it's reached anywhere near the size of Snapchat's user base.
I live in the UK and everyone I know uses Whatsapp as their main method of communication while Snapchat activity seems to have dropped very quickly, perhaps in favour of Instagram, in my experience anyway.
WhatsApp: circumvent cellphone texting charges
Airbnb: circumvent hotel laws
Uber: circumvent taxi laws
Amazon: circumvent state taxes
Facebook: circumvent people's anonymity online
Google: circumvent copyrights (take people's content slap on ads)
WhatsApp: cheap plentiful messaging
Airbnb: cheap plentiful vacation rentals
Uber: cheap plentiful taxis
Amazon: cheap plentiful stuff
Facebook: ... umm i'm sure there's something here ...
Google: cheap plentiful access to information
All of these disrupt the slow-moving complacent dinosaurs of the past.
In the case of WhatsApp, it came from telco monopolies overcharging for a particular use of data. I'm certainly ok with that.
And I was initially excited about Airbnb, rideshare, etc, because some of the cheap comes from finding underutilized resources (an apartment that happened to be empty for a few weeks, people who were going somewhere anyhow) and putting them to work.
But I find the second-order effects fascinating. Certainly some of Airbnb and Uber's cheapness comes from dodging regulation and shifting costs onto other people.
"Privatize the gains, socialize the losses" is undeniably a lucrative business strategy, but it's not one I particularly want to celebrate.
This doesn't describe anything that AirBnB or Uber are doing.
Taxis were expensive and horrible because governments created artificial scarcity via taxi medallion systems. They were "socializing the gains", to build off your aphorism.
Uber re-privatized the gains by circumventing this ridiculous system, and we're all much better for it.
"Socializing the losses" refers to groups getting bailed out on taxpayer dime when they fail, and nothing even resembling that has happened with AirBnB or Uber.
But taxi medallion systems served a number of purposes. One of the big ones is reasonable regulation of taxi and driver quality. Another was keeping supply and demand balanced at a level where people didn't have to cut corners on things like taxi maintenance just to survive, which helped keep taxi fleets safe. A third was setting up a reasonably livable wage for career taxi drivers. A fourth, at least in some cities, was creating a de-facto retirement system: since drivers had dibs on medallions, they could invest and create an asset that would fund their retirement. A fifth was creating a revenue stream for cities to that helps pay for regulatory and road costs. Those are off the top of my head; I'm sure there were more.
Now instead a lot of those costs are borne by other people. Uber has shifted capital and maintenance costs entirely away from cab companies and on to random people desperate enough to drive for Uber. Losses are no longer the problem of the cab company, but individuals. When those drivers go bankrupt, society bears the costs. When those drives use public assistance [1], society bears the costs. When they retire and we make up for their lost retirement savings, society bears the costs. And that's to say nothing of the direct and indirect societal costs that come from more traffic.
Similar issues come up with Airbnb. E.g., if you thought you were living next to a neighbor and now are dealing with an illegal one-unit hotel in your building, you are experiencing a loss. If the apartment you rent out is trashed because somebody is running an illegal business out of it [2], you experience significant loss. When rent goes up because people are illegally converting housing to de-facto hotel stock, that is a socialized loss with privatized gains.
I'm not even saying this is necessarily worse. As with the bankruptcy system as a whole, it can sometimes be overall better for society to pay for something. But we shouldn't sweep this stuff under the rug.
[1] E.g., https://uberpeople.net/threads/you-may-qualify-for-governmen...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/01/airbnb-nightmare-homeowners-...
I can only imagine that someone who rarely or never travels would say something like this. The main reason I switched to uber is that taxis are universally horrible, both in terms of drivers and vehicles. It's gotten much better since uber forced them to compete, but they still generally suck.
So maybe you're right, and that was the reason for taxi medallions; but guess what? It didn't work.
> Uber has shifted capital and maintenance costs entirely away from cab companies and on to random people desperate enough to drive for Uber.
Again, this is something that I can't imagine hearing from someone who actually uses Ubers on a regular basis. Most Uber drivers I've talked to love the platform, and a good portion of them are e.g. students working a side job, none of them "desperate" people.
> I can only imagine that someone who rarely or never travels would say something like this.
Your imagination is poor. I've lived on 4 continents and am on an extended trip even as I write this.
We're talking about different kinds of regulation. You apparently care about things being shiny; most regulation, though, is about setting a minimum bar.
In the early, high-growth days of something, regulation is rarely useful because everybody's on their best behavior. It becomes more important when things settle down into a relatively steady state. Then, the incentive to shave nickels and dimes can come out elsewhere. E.g., taxis face significant safety inspections and maintenance requirements because when you use a car as a commercial vehicle, you put a lot more miles on it and you are more likely face safety issues.
We don't yet see these problems with UberX because it has only been going for a few years, and because Uber has a strong incentive to keep from becoming an obvious disaster until growth slows and revenue gains come more from exploiting their market position.
> Most Uber drivers I've talked to love the platform
Gosh, might they have some incentive to only say happy things to you? Gosh, might there be some selection bias in your sample? Gosh, might people not talk about their pain and fears to random strangers?
But if the system isn't sustainable, then in the long term customers don't get what they want. So when we're designing society-level systems, we need to think about society-scale sustainability.
Personally, instead of our hodgepodge of retirement and health insurance systems, I think we should just fund a strong safety net out of taxes. That minimizes barriers to entrepreneurship and avoids distortions. But that's not what America had when the medallion system was being developed, so we got what we got. You can certainly propose a change to that, but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to explain how you'll solve the problems the existing system solves, or at least be honest that you're not solving them.
Who are those all? Taxi drivers or the general public? I'd rather have professional, decently paid, taxi drivers instead of amateur hour weekend drivers making minimum wage at the expense of yet another working class job.
Almost every day.
In London, Uber is a taxi service. The people driving for Uber are taxi drivers, with taxi driver licenses [1], and the vehicles they drive are taxis, with taxi licenses [2]. The experience is therefore much the same. The difference arises from three things: Uber has a nice app, whereas legacy taxi offices are a shambles; Uber drivers are desperate to keep their star rating up, and so might be nicer; Uber subsidises the whole operation to win market share. The app is the only significant difference, in my experience.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
Amazon's era of sales tax evasion is mostly over. And if anyone is monetising copyright infringement it's not Google (who are somewhat conscientious about this after some lawsuits) but Tumblr (literally made of copyright infringing photos)
(The era of Amazon posting things from Jersey to UK and other destinations for similar reasons ended ages ago)
I was also restricting myself to the question of sales taxes; tax evasion/avoidance among the internet tech monoliths is a wider question.
WhatsApp: circumvent cellphone texting charges, making texting cheaper
Airbnb: circumvent hotel laws, making staying anywhere cheaper
Uber: circumvent taxi laws, making taxis and flexible transport cheaper
Amazon: circumvent state taxes (and VAT, until recently, and still the case in Europe, Australia and I'm sure many other jurisdictions), making getting mail-order goods cheaper
PS for Amazon: and also making mail-order a great deal faster.
PPS for Amazon: also cut out many middlemen to make things cheaper.
Facebook: make advertising to particular groups, accurately identified, a LOT cheaper
Google: Make it a lot cheaper to find things online.
But Why stay in tech ?
Aldi + their discounter competitors: Make groceries a lot cheaper by cutting out the middleman
GE, in their day: Make lighting and anything that could be done cheaper electrically a lot cheaper. Or possible at all in the first place.
VW, in their day: make owning a car a lot cheaper.
GDF/Suez: make transporting goods from Europe to Asia a lot faster (but mostly cheaper).
Keep in mind Jevon's paradox. Cheaper does not just mean cheaper, as in less dollars. It also means that whatever becomes cheaper becomes more ubiquitous. Faster. Becomes accessible for more people, either in difficult geographies, or poor, or ... It also means those things become feasible to use for various purposes that they couldn't be used for before. It means a lot more of said good/service will get used. And so on and so forth.
You want to make $1 million ? Become great in a particular subject, and consult.
You want to make $10-$100 million ? Start a company with a niche product, and do it really well.
Want to make $100 million - $1 billion ? Start a company and bribe the government, so that it either pays you directly or forces loads of people to pay for your services (lots of these in Washington and Brussels)
You want to make $1-$10 billion ? Make some stupid ubiquitous product cheaper. Think the most moronic normal things in existence. Breakfast cereal. Grapes. Web search.
I'm pretty sure you made up every claim you just wrote. Why would you bother doing that?
Notably - as you mentioned - Wechat in China, but also Kakao in Korea, Zalo in Vietnam and Line in Japan and Taiwan, where very few people use Whatsapp.
Second, even if they didn't, with 1.3B users it's as large or larger than any other competitor app globally.
Third, they got 16B for it, while spending like $10 million to make it.
So I don't get where the sneer comes from.
Even if the statement wasn't false, it's not as if use in Asia is the be all end all of success?
ot, i don't understand why anyone would want to get anywhere near mobile. people are too stupid to use these internet devices in moderation and it will destroy all social cohesion. it's a cash grab to the bottom as it devolves into radical groupthink, a breakdown of dialogue, and mass segregation of populations.
how is arguing about anything and everything productive or useful without domain specific expertise? how is mindlessly consuming hours and hours of infotainment benefiting anyone?
but i can instantly communicate to anyone around the world in a matter of milliseconds! your life is not that interesting, a letter sent by post every other month would probably be more fruitful to developing ideas, advancing discourse and carefully articulating thoughts. it's like correspondence chess vs 1 minute bullet matches. one is excited screaming and shouting, the other is a measured conversation and exchange. pretty sure e-mail hit that sweet spot decades ago, with bulletin boards and irc filling the less personal and more immediate gaps.