Re:WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without L...
by inthewoods on Sunday September 03, 2017 @08:53PM
(#15164874)
>This allowed them to _SCALE_ revenue because they're basically dividing by zero (Income v. Expenses)
Don't disagree with anything you said except scaling revenue. As far as I can tell they never really scaled revenue, but instead became such a threat to FB in terms of users that Zuck felt he had to give up a substantial portion of his company to own them.
Or put another way, if FB (or anyone else) and not bought them, where would they be?
Re:WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without L...
by ramses0 on Monday September 04, 2017 @07:39PM
(#15171522)
Probably 20-50 people, 100-200 servers, and comfortably sitting on 10-30% of global instant messaging traffic running through their servers. If that's not somewhat interesting to somebody then I've got a bridge to sell you.
Re:WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without L...
by inthewoods on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @09:51AM
(#15183626)
It's not a question of "somewhat interesting" - it's a question of what would be their revenue source.
Focusing on reach (ubiquity is an innovation). Focusing on operational efficiency (a low-cost tech company is an innovation).
The apocryphal stories about WhatsApp in support of the two above points are:
1) Supporting J2ME clients (ie: dumb-phones) ... connecting "poor people" in dumb-phone countries w/ "rich people" in smart-phone countries (for $0.99 app).
$0.99 / user * 25% of your userbase isn't enough revenue for most companies to be successful.
2) Be operationally efficient, reliable, and lean. How? By running like 10 erlang servers (targeting peak message transmission RATES, not all-time storage of messages or number of users)
This allowed them to _SCALE_ revenue because they're basically dividing by zero (Income v. Expenses) if they're extremely lean on number of employees, maintenance, and operations costs.
Therefore: it compares extremely well to Juicero as a counter-example.