What the history of WhatsApp is teaching us?

WhatsApp is a history of a "hypergrowth". Founded in 2009, WhatsApp was worth more than 22 billion dollars five years later. In a few years, this service of instant messaging on mobile phones has been widespread in the world. Above all, WhatsApp is the history of an American company which built its hypergrowth outside the USA.

A little bit of history

WhatsApp was founded in 2009 in Mountain View, California by Jan Koum and Brian Acton. Its goal was to replace text messages. The idea of this app came from Jan Koum, who grew up in Kiev (Ukraine, USSR) and whose parents avoided telephone conversations because they were eavesdropped by the Communist authorities. This convinced him of the necessity of unrecorded communications and that is why, unlike other apps, WhatsApp only asks for a telephone number to register and does not store messages sent between users.

The expansion of WhatsApp mainly happened outside of the USA even though the company is American. The indicator of this growth was, and is, the proportion of active mobile users on WhatsApp.

In 2014, WhatsApp was bought by Facebook. The statistic of this year is relevant because it expresses the result of the growth BEFORE BUYOUT. In 2014, the penetration rate of WhatsApp among American users was only of 8%.

The chart above shows that WhatsApp was particularly popular on markets outside the USA, notably in Mexico, South Africa, Brazil and India. 

The 'driver' of WhatsApp’s growth is indeed international. 

Percentage of active mobile users on WhatsApp in 2014

Collect growth wherever it is

In the digital era, nowadays it is possible to collect growth wherever it is depending on its market. How?

Innovation

This is the first key of WhatsApp’s growth and today, of WeChat and Telegraph, its Chinese and Russian competitors:

• Text, audio and then video-taped message
• Data sharing
• Group discussion
• Message cryptography

The messaging system succeeded in competing with free standard call thanks to continuous innovations. 

The international

The history of WhatsApp is, above all, a vision of global development. The countries where text messaging are chargeable gave the first growth leverage to WhatsApp. Furthermore, the application is particularly useful for international communications which are also chargeable. 

To succeed in its development, WhatsApp will globalize its team and adapt its HR strategy. 

Without leaving the USA, WhatsApp became a globalized company. 

In conclusion:

Originally, Jan Koum and Brian Acton conceived WhatsApp as a cross-border solution. Both of them came from two different countries. The founding team was, itself, international. Subsequent recruitment, the innovations brought to the solution, the development strategy, everything contributed to build a growth relying on the broadcast of the application outside the USA. 

Pascal Faucon - What the history of WhatsApp is teaching us?

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