WhatsApp was successful only because they had no intention of ever making money. Simple lightweight app, no tracking, no ads, no upsell. Yet they were funded by VCs who would want a return on their investment at some point.

> WhatsApp was successful only because they had no intention of ever making money.

IIRC they had 450M users when they sold to FB. Their plan was to charge $1/user/yr. A $450M ARR company run by 50 people would have done fine.

But if they started charging even 1$/user/year, most of the 450M users might not be on the platform. There are other free platforms offered with similar functionality. Security/Privacy is not a concern for a lot of that 450M users.

>The only thing they failed at was making money.

Huh? They're all million/billionaires now. That part of the plan seems to have worked.

Because they sold to FB. I think parent meant "they failed to make money on their own"

You probably don't know the story. Selling was part of the plan all along. Whatsapp didn't even try to make money on their own.

The founders hearts were in the right place. Brian Acton created Signal Foundation and Jan Koum like I said also have done good things.

They also tried the paid version for a while if you remember. And they were also dead against ads on the app. Unless I missed something or if I am wrong somewhere (At which point I would love to be corrected), Selling was the plan all along doesn't seem like a right observation.

>The founders hearts were in the right place. Brian Acton created Signal Foundation and Jan Koum like I said also have done good things.

I'm not saying they are bad people, and selling is not a bad thing either. I'm just pointing out that selling was the plan all along.

The WhatsApp story that gets told regularly (like in this instance) is a story of how such few employees and such small infrastructure is enough to build a massive product. You know what that translates to? Low opex. If they wanted to, WhatsApp would've been quite profitable if they wanted but instead they chose to sell to the highest bidder.

Again, that's not a bad thing, but also, I'm sure there were PLENTY of people that were interested in buying a billion user platform with 99% user retention. Why did they sold to Facebook? Only they know, but back then Facebook already had a tarnished reputation, so they definitely didn't do it "because of their mission and values".

This is a good point of view and this is entirely possible. But from an employee POV, FB was touted the best place to work. Things like that would've been a reason to select.

There is another chance that FB was seen as the lesser evil compared to Google then, who was also in the bidding for Whatsapp IIRC. My younger self would've chosen FB instead of Google for sure.

Not to mention, people wouldn't have guessed how horrible FB would turn out to be.

Edit: Funnily enough, after I wrote this comment, It became clear that money was definitely a factor.

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.

They ended up with a billion or two users. $1-2 billion with the subscription is good for a company of a few dozen employees. They could have branched into all sorts of value-add stuff in the future if they wanted to, all without tracking and such even. A simple payments or shopping interface a la Instagram Stores could have done the trick.

source?

I meant they as in Whatsapp - the company. And yeah to be more specific, I meant making revenue on their own.

presumably they meant revenue