
Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp - sama
https://www.startupschool.org/videos/8
======
a_d
Jan is the entrepreneur that I admire the most. Here are some of the reasons:

1\. He was so focused on building the product that he just ignored all emails
from carriers and investors. Sequoia partners had to hunt down Whatsapp's
office just to get in touch with him. Most entrepreneurs would be easily
distracted by investor attention.

2\. He didn't care about the press (despite a ton of inbound interest). I
don't know how or why he could resist the temptation, but he did for a long
time. In fact at one point he tried to consciously stay out of press because
he wanted to "manage" growth and didn't want competitors to get wind.

3\. Very balanced outlook towards global users - even though SV (or even US)
didn't recognize their traction, he always understood that there is a big
world out there where not everyone has an iPhone.

4\. Focus on infrastructure and reliability.

5\. Focus on being "lean". For a long time the team was quite small - but the
thing I find most telling is the fact that he didn't have "business people"
for a long time - anyone who didn't build the product. At acquisiton I think
they had a GC and a business operations guy. It it amazing to be able to
resist the temptation to build an empire.

Whichever way you look at it, he comes across as someone who is able to resist
common temptations and had a great balanced head on his shoulder.

There is Lot to learn from Jan

~~~
zeusk
> 3\. Very balanced outlook towards global users - even though SV (or even US)
> didn't recognize their traction, he always understood that there is a big
> world out there where not everyone has an iPhone.

This impressed me the most, because at the time whatsapp went mainstream
globally - it was available on all platforms including the old BlackberryOS,
BlackBerry 10, Symbian (S60), Windows Phone and even some candy phones!! which
was unlike any other messaging platform and I have a good reason to believe it
was instrumental in their success given how many of my friends switched to
whatsapp just because everyone in the group could use it (we had WP, Android
and iOS users and one oddball BB10 user [me]).

~~~
ohstopitu
And that is why they succeeded imo. Because Facebook bought Whatsapp for it's
1 Billion users, and Whatsapp would never have hit that mark had it not been
for the fact that they focused on market outside the US (where cheaper phones
with android, candybar and other OSes were more popular).

While Whatsapp is still not as big in the US, it's literally the defacto mode
of communication in countries like India, Brazil etc. to the point where "Msg
me" would automatically mean "Msg me on Whatsapp"

That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion
genius. I for a thousand years would not have though too much about Global
Market (because I'd be focused on revenue and users in 1st world countries
would be generally the ones with spending cash for messaging apps).

~~~
thirdsun
> That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion
> genius.

This is an important aspect. Having accounts and contacts based on phone
numbers allowed my mother and her friends to use the service in no time -
those are the kind of people that don't know their own email address (if they
have one at all) and would never register for an account on their own. Phone
numbers, however, is the system they already knew since using SMS.

------
ramblerman
This was interesting, and well presented. So my beef isn't with Jan but more
so with the startupschool initiative. (focus on school)

How do you learn anything tangible from this? It's just a bunch of successful
people talking about what they did. Without more context this is just
survivorship bias, most of these aren't even serial entrepreneurs.

~~~
garysieling
I find that seeing about how someone else thinks about / breaks down a complex
problem is helpful. Sometimes you can also see where the speaker has a blind
spot - an interesting thought experiment is to consider how you'd compete with
their company.

------
dirtyaura
The talk raised interesting points about hiring. Jan said that most of the
early hires were people from their own networks that currently were
"unemployed" or goofing around and that's why it was easy to hire them. So it
sounds that they hired people that they knew and trusted but who, for an
outsider, would look like were not great at execution.

And yet, Whatsapp is clearly a startup that excelled especially at the
execution. They successfully build multiplatform product that included OSes
that were traditionally seen as cumbersome to build for (Symbian, Java ME).
Many, many companies have struggled and failed to do that. It also seems that
they scaled really well (compared to e.g. Twitter)

~~~
plinkplonk
(without reading the article/listening to the talk) I suspect "unemployed"
meant something like

"worked at yahoo for double digit years, cashed out shares, and so don't have
to take dumb jobs for eating money, so free to tackle new challenges"

not

"so bad at programming they couldn't find a job in a hot market"

~~~
dirtyaura
Yes, I understood that, I tried to indicate that by writing "unemployed" \-
i.e. they were talented but taking it easy by their own choice (one guy
apparently for 10 years). However, for a person who hadn't worked with these
guys, it wouldn't be obvious that they would efficient in the execution, as
many times people err to use a filled/gapless CV as a proxy for execution
capability.

------
ryandrake
Super congratulations for successfully reading the "messaging" tea leaves and
capitalizing on the trend. I admire the vision. I would have never in my
wildest imagination predicted the extent to which text messaging became a
killer app on mobile--to the point where we have dozens (hundreds?) of
different apps to choose from. I still don't see the appeal of messaging apps,
but their popularity is undeniable. People don't even seem to mind the fact
that all of these apps do fundamentally the same thing yet are largely
incompatible with each other.

~~~
iopq
We had XMPP, but Google and Facebook decided to kill it.

~~~
Markoff
i just don't understand why we don't replace it with universal email, everyone
has it and it is certainly possible to build chat on top of it

------
MrGrillet
I enjoyed this talk and took away something slightly different to others on
the talk...

For me, what was clear is that they listened to feedback and took action
relatively quickly. I remember when they first launched the Blackberry version
and emailing the team about bugs - I think I got a response the following day
and they clearly implemented something by the following release.

It wasn't about being devoted to a vision of a particular product they were
passionate about. They saw a market/ problem and solved it using their
technical ability.

Yes, they had a lot of luck on their side - being in the market early enough
to gain the visibility. Also, people naturally promoted the app so they didn't
need to spend much on marketing. Other apps that came after it, weren't so
lucky. Being well connected and having cash to provide initial runway probably
made this easier for him than it would be for most but I think it's fair to
say he built up his rep at Yahoo - which probably helped when he needed to
raise cash.

------
adgasf
How did WhatsApp survive between idea -> first charging users?

------
alexkon
Why did they avoid any media attention?

------
NavyDish
Can you please post a reddit-AMA style proof to assure users that it really is
you. It is unbelievable that you weren't aware of HN and that the profile was
created just a few hours ago. Thanks. :)

~~~
jankoum
i have no idea what is reddit-AMA style proof is... sorry i didn't get around
to making HN account before today.

~~~
zaatar
A simple tweet from your verified twitter account @jankoum to indicate that
your "HN username = jankoum" should suffice.

------
Phlow
I honestly don't even want to watch this, out of spite.

Whatsapp is so damn frustrating to me and the people I talk to.

The microphone button is so finicky that I lose hours of my week to trashed
messages. I don't know if it's the size of the button being so tiny that a
man's thumb easily hangs over the edges, triggering the trash feature with the
slightest movement, or some other strange bug. A call comes in, message
trashed. An alarm, message trashed. I've literally recorded a 10 minute
message and lost it, condensed it to 5 minutes and lost it, condensed it to an
angry 2 minutes and lost it and then just given up...

Then there's the volume. Why do I have to crank Whatsapp up so high in my car
that EVERY OTHER audio event blows my ears out?

How are these huge usability problems not being fixed with the amount of money
that was thrown at it?

I can't find anyone or anywhere to complain about it either. The Contact Us
area of the application REQUIRES you to give them your full contact list
before you proceed.

~~~
tidmutt
This!!! I would upvote 1000 times if I could. I appreciate Whatsapp's features
but voice recording is just broken. I experience this same frustration... I
tried submitting feedback through the app and it failed and lost what I wrote
due to the default mail client not being configured. Oh the irony.

Please fix. These are minor changes.

------
ssimoni
It is very nice to have first mover advantage. Many web and mobile application
companies today do not have first mover advantage. This was a good talk to
listen to if you have quietly stumbled on something that people want before
the rest of the product builders find out.

~~~
hboon
But they didn't have first mover advantage. There was ping and a few other
similar apps on the iOS app store.

WhatsApp focused (correctly) on distribution over several platforms.

~~~
mtgx
BBM had _huge_ potential as well in the early days. Blackberry practically
_invented_ this "SMS-alternative" type of chat application. It was being
quickly adopted in emerging markets as a replacement for SMS, which was much
more expensive. However, Blackberry screwed that up by keeping BBM Blackberry-
only for so long. The BBM should have been available on the iOS and Android
stores (and probably on Symbian/Java) since 2009 at the latest (basically when
Whatsapp was launched), and it would've dominated.

~~~
jankoum
yes of course - because having a random 8 digit hex pin was so user friendly,
easy and intuitive :)

~~~
a_d
What did you do in the very early days to promote the app (apart from
Flyertalk)?

~~~
jankoum
heh Flyertalk... awesome forum btw.

until we added messaging nothing I did worked. once we added messaging it took
off on its own.

~~~
a_d
You mentioned in one of your talks about a small loophole in the early days of
the App Store where apps were showcased under "new and noteworthy" if one made
an update to the app - Q1: is this true?

And Q2: when you say "took off on its own" does it mean folks learned about
WhatsApp only from word of mouth with no effort from the WhatsApp team?

Q3: what impact did charging for the app have on the company finances and
growth rate?

~~~
jankoum
1\. yes, i believe so - of course it was eight years ago.. i think if you
submitted new version of the app and changed the name, it would show up under
"new" category

2\. yes, word of mouth only... but we helped people spread the word by putting
"Tell A Friend" functionality into the app :)

3\. it helped us pay for office space, salaries and server bills without
eating much into VC or angel money we had in our bank account.

~~~
mifeng
Re #2: I remember hearing about WhatsApp from my friends in 2009 or 2010. They
said, "it's basically BBM that lets you communicate with non-Blackberry phones
for free." Since those of us who had Blackberries used BBM non-stop, it was a
no-brainer to get WhatsApp.

