Let's follow the path (based on a thread on Twitter @arvanaghi)
- WhatsApp has two founders: Jan Koum and Brian Acton. They worked at Yahoo for 9 years, left with money and without ideas of what to do next.
- They tried to get a job at Facebook and were rejected (proud members of the "Rejected by Facebook Club").
- In January 2009, Jan bought his first iPhone from the AppStore (which had launched only 7 months ago). And he saw potential.
- Friends brainstormed and came up with the idea of an application that would put statuses in the address book next to the names of friends: "Free, busy, at work," and so on. They named the app WhatsApp.
- They hired a programmer on RentACoder for the first build and published the application.
- Aaaaaand they got only a few hundred downloads. It was a failure. A few months passed, but they decided to give it another chance.
- In June 2009, Apple offered a new feature - notifications from applications (although it seems like it was always there?).
- Jan Koum and Brian Acton added this feature to WhatsApp: every time friends change their status, you receive a message about it.
- Users loved it! The first WhatsApp users began using statuses to joke with friends. These statuses turned into funny messages.
- That's how the messenger appeared. They wrote WhatsApp 2.0 and added the ability to exchange messages. The application immediately took off.
- In 2011, WhatsApp was ranked 20th among all applications in the US and valued at $1.5 billion.
- Later, Mark Zuckerberg wrote to them and offered to meet. In 3 years, the new messenger had gathered 90 million users and grew faster than FB.
- In 2013, WhatsApp grew by 1 million users per day!
- In 2014, Facebook bought it for $19.3 billion (at that time, it had 450 million users and only 56 employees).
Today, WhatsApp has 2.1 billion users and could be worth $100 billion as a standalone company.
