What WhatsApp Did Right, According to Jan Koum (Video)

One of the revolutionary things we did, if you look historically [at] how people have done instant messaging, you can look at ICQ, where you would have a random number, or BBM, where you would have an eight-digit number. There was always an exchange, a buddy exchange: “Can you please add me to your friends list?” Even on Skype you have to have their user name and a handshake.

We kind of looked at this and said, you have this address book on your phone, and the best thing about it is [that] it’s people who matter to you the most. It’s a contact you communicate with a lot, otherwise you wouldn’t have them in your address book. And we said, why can’t we take that as the basis of your contact list? Why do we always need to create a different graph?

We were mobile-only. A lot of people would compare us to Skype or Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and we would kind of scratch our heads and say, “Why?” We’re an extremely mobile-oriented company on product; we don’t have a desktop client, we don’t have a Web client. And I think it’s a benefit to us, because the thing about SMS is [that] when you send a message to somebody you know, it’s going to their phone; their phone is always with them. When you give somebody your phone number, you let them interrupt you, be it with a phone call or SMS. So we said to ourselves, “We want to build a mobile experience because we know it will reach you in real time.”

We started out on an iPhone. We did something that is counterintuitive; we started charging on the iPhone early on. And it left a lot of people kind of scratching their head, and asking, “Why would they charge?” We actually had people walk in and tell us, “Don’t you want your network to grow faster?” And we’re like, “No.” We’ve always focused on organic growth: We never bought ads, we’ve never done user acquisition, we’ve never done any kind of promotion to grow our network. We always want our network to grow organically.

Everybody I meet who uses WhatsApp, I ask them a question: “How did you hear about it?” And they say my friends, my sister or my brother, somebody I know hounded me to install WhatsApp. We think there is more power to the network when it grows organically. There is more power to the application when you install it and use it because your friends are on it.

We started charging early on because it allowed us to provide better service, to buy more servers, to hire engineers, to keep the lights on. It actually grew our network at a slower pace, but it became a more powerful, connected, stronger network.

We actually write native code on every platform. … We want as many people on our network as we can. We don’t want to exclude anybody. Think of a family somewhere in a third-world company where they don’t necessarily have Android or iPhone and the kids have lower-end Nokia phones, and they want to participate and communicate with their friends across the globe. For us it’s very important to include everybody. We’re a network of participation; we want everybody to participate. Everybody who wants to join WhatsApp, we’ll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.