Jeremy Tan Takes Lessons from Whatsapp Founders

2009, two guys quit their jobs at Yahoo. Today their app’s used by 2.7B people. 📲 
 
When Jan and Brian traveled to South America... They ran out of money.
 
So they had two options: 👇🏻
 
a) Go back and work for another company OR
b) Create their own.
 
Just like that, Whatsapp was born.
They were bought over by Facebook years after.

 
These are the top 4 lessons from their journey:
 
🟢1/Tackle a problem you’ve lived through
 
Jan Koum, one of Whatsapp’s co-founders and an immigrant,
Struggled to communicate with distant family during his teenage years.
Cross-country phone calls and texts were too expensive and irregular.
The solution? An accessible, cross-platform app to keep everyone updated.
 
🟢2/Version 1.0 is not final
 
After hiring a freelance programmer to build the app...
They only got a few hundred downloads with bad reviews…
Battery draining, app crashing, etc.
Though on the verge of giving up, they agreed to give it more time.

A month after launch, Apple added push notifications as a feature and it was a game-changer.

They quickly adapted their strategy building the app around social updates.
On relaunch, from a few hundred downloads, Whatsapp successfully rose to 10,000 downloads a day.

 
🟢3/Weigh early monetisation vs experience
 
Whatsapp was built to be intuitive, user-friendly and sticky.
They didn’t entertain the idea of ad revenue, which made the product better to use.
Through this, they built a loyal user base. Many of which continue to use the app today.
Eventually Whatsapp began charging $0.99 for the app, while continuing to grow.

 
🟢4/Go where the market is
 
Remember SMS? Certain carriers offered it for free,
But some global carriers still charged metered fees.

Taking the app outside of the US 🇺🇸 to Asia/Europe was where they saw the most growth.
Even to date, the USA is their worst-performing market. But they found disruption elsewhere.
 
Whatsapp did NOT follow a conventional journey.
Their founders were holding stable jobs and they raised a seed round from friends.
 
They ran Whatsapp grounded on values and patient building.
It seems so obvious now on hindsight, but it’s still a great story to inspire.
 
What lessons did you take away from their journey?