- Brian Acton and Jan Koum
I have been using WhatsApp for a few years now—up to three years. But WhatsApp is already 6 years old. When I started using it then, I tried to check out their background and story on the web, but I found next to nothing. I did one thing, I went to their blog and it was not properly set up and they were doing zero marketing and zero promotion.
All these never stopped WhatsApp from growing huge and disrupting how we send SMS and communicate with friends and love ones. WhatsApp isn’t the first of the instant messaging to be available on mobile. I remember that I used Yahoo Messenger on my first BlackBerry phone—BlackBerry 9700.
The founders of WhatsApp deserve what they just got. You’re more likely to agree with me once you read their story and see how things was with them when they were slaving out and building WhatsApp in the trenches.
Brian Acton and Jan Koum, founders of WhatsApp, were once Yahoo employees—working on Yahoo advertising. They were renowned to have been dissatisfied with how things became at Yahoo and decided to both leave in September 2007. “Dealing with ads is depressing… You don’t make anyone’s life better by making advertisement work better,” Acton says as reported by Forbes. They tried to both get jobs at Twitter and Facebook. They spent time at Facebook job board, but were repeatedly turned down.
The iPhone and the App Store that was simply 7 months old in January 2009 when Koum bought his iPhone. This made him realize that the App Store was going to spawn a huge industry for apps.
The idea for WhatsApp came from a conversation Jan Koum had with Alex Fisherman, a friend. Koum wanted the ability for folks to be able to open their phone book and see status messages that’ll show what their contact was doing. He chose the name WhatsApp cos it was close to what’s up. He incorporated WhatsApp on Feb. 24, 2009 as WhatsApp Inc. in California.
In the early stages of WhatsApp, it was simply for updating status messages and nothing more. The introduction of push notification by Apple in June 2009 allowed developers to ping users when they’re not using the app. WhatsApp was updated; since then, whenever a WhatsApp users changes status message, everyone in his network will be notified. That was the instant that it became an Instant messaging service. BBM—BlackBerry Messenger—was around then, but it was only available, until recently, to BlackBerry users. BBM was the only free texting service. There was Yahoo messenger, G-Talk and Skype. But the uniqueness of WhatsApp was that it used the user’s phone number.
That started the beginning of a company that just sold to Facebook for a whooping $16 billion USD.
WhatsApp has over 450 million monthly active users now (2014). In 2009, they were just 250,00 when WhatsApp 2.0 was released.
Read the rest of the story as covered by Forbes. It makes for an interesting read.
The dedication that the two have to the product and their resilience after leaving a well paying dissatisfying job at Yahoo shows bravery. They have now reaped the reward of their labour that started in 2009.
There’s something about the earlier years of Jan’s life. He only came to US with his mother at the age of 16. He also thought himself how to code by buying books and practicing.
Lessons for today’s status founders
This doesn’t mean that everyone should go and start creating mobile messaging services, thinking they also want to be bought over by Facebook or another great company. That’s not the idea. Read the story and see that a lot of dynamics came into play. Jan never set out to build a messaging service, but ended up building one. He never built it so as to sell to Facebook. But he eventually did. See?
Follow the principles and a few traits that made him consistently successful even while faced with failure at some point, and you’ll one day ride to fame in your chosen entrepreneurial journey.
