> Threema was launched in 2013
> WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014
So a year after Threema's launch, it was competing with a multi-billion dollar global corporation which already had a user count in the billions.
> Signal to launch an iOS app in 2014
Signal is free (which a lot of casual users care about) and open-source (which a lot of privacy/security-conscious users care about).
> Why? I'm guessing because the founders lacked the experience or the right people to guide them from startup into massive growth [...] sadly Switzerland lacks the people with that kind of experience.
Can't the same be said of other European tech startups like Spotify and Skype?
Plus, ProtonMail, another startup in a similar space, based in Switzerland, has managed to become basically "the" secure email provider.
I think the real story here is much simpler: Threema is a small company and came into a competitive space where it had to compete on multiple fronts: tech giants on one, open-source on the other. As a paid _messaging_ app, it had a difficult future ahead of it whatever it did, no matter where it was based.
And for Switzerland in general, remember that it's a small country that has fewer than 9M people. Don't take the absence of unicorns to indicate that they're impossible.
EDIT: One more thing that occurred to me - what's the alternative? I'd suggest that a good part of the reason why Threema got the success it did in the German-speaking world was that it was from Switzerland. If it came from say the US, I suspect it wouldn't be trusted.