WhatsApp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVxnKuFarA



Brian Acton and Jan Koum the cofounders met at Yahoo and knowledge spillover happened there (after having worked 9 years there ). They also had seed funding. They hired a lot from Yahoo!.

Opportunity:
iPhone app store. As a project was a definitely the first idea.
Messaging app was a new idea. Yahoo: websites. Mobile was new.

Founded in 2009 . iPhone app store was 6 months old.
Status. Yahoo messenger and ICQ. Problem is: Are you there? Away from Keyboard (AFK). Simplify this. Status and presence and apply it to a phone.

No one was using the app. Not what people needed. The product did not solve a problem that people had.

Apple introduced push notification and this became the opportunity. Whatsapp incorporated push notification for status notifications. In Europe, people were paying euros to send SMS across country. SMS was limited to text and not multimedia. Whatsapp was solving a problem.

Why not Skype? Accounts user names and passwords was a problem. Whatsapp wanted to take the best of SMS. No pass login. So Whatsapp pulled contact information and automatically added lists.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
In January 2010, support for BlackBerry smartphones was added, and subsequently for Symbian OS in May 2010 and for Android OS in August 2010. In August 2011 a beta for Nokia's non-smartphone OS Series 40 was added. A month later support for Windows Phone was added, followed by BlackBerry 10 in March 2013

Critical Mass:
They recognized an opportunity on the iPhone app store. They developed Whatsapp for the iPhone, Android and also Nokia. Back then many users on Nokia s40 and s60. It fueled a lot of their growth. Take advantage of a technological advancements.

Their user base started abroad in Europe and other countries. It got the attention of the Silicon Valley later.

Pricing:
In response to the Facebook acquisition in 2014, Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias questioned whether the company's business model of charging users $1 a year was viable in the United States in the long term. It had prospered by exploiting a "loophole" in mobile phone carriers' pricing. "Mobile phone operators aren't really selling consumers some voice service, some data service, and some SMS service", he explained. "They are selling access to the network. The different pricing schemes they come up with are just different ways of trying to maximize the value they extract from consumers."[132] As part of that, carriers sold SMS separately. That made it easy for WhatsApp to find a way to replicate SMS using data, and then sell that to mobile customers for $1 a year. "But if WhatsApp gets big enough, then carrier strategy is going to change", he predicted. "You stop selling separate SMS plans and just have a take-it-or-leave-it overall package. And then suddenly WhatsApp isn't doing anything."[132] The situation may have been different in countries other than the United States.