A Short History of Messaging
Messaging began when pigeons volunteered to carry love letters. From postman to email, from SMS to Twitter, messages kept going. At the top of human evolution, came WhatsApp. 1.4 million WhatsApp messages have been sent since you began reading this post, including the ones sent to you right now!
Why WhatsApp?
- Uses phone contacts. No need to add buddies.
- Free unlimited messaging after one-time download fee.
- Cross-platform (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia).
- Multimedia, group chat.
- Ad-free.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
– Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. The problem is that ads suck and ads suck even more on the small screen of a mobile device. We want to provide the best user experience and doing advertising will only get in the way of clean UI.
- Koum & Brian, Founders of WhatsApp
WhatsApp spends no money on marketing. The team consists of 17 engineers and 3 customer support executives. A paid system made them cash flow positive and they concentrate on improving the product rather than monetization.
Business Model
As of now, 1 server at WhatsApp can serve over 2 million TCP connections with plenty of CPU and memory to spare. This reduces costs and enables a low-price and ad-free model, eventually creating a +ve network externality.
No comments:
Post a Comment