What Was It Like To Be An Early Adopter of Whatsapp?

Can you imagine what it must be like to be an early adopter of Whatsapp? When 95% of your friends still used SMSes but you chose to adopt a vague new messaging app with a cool name that started with W ;) — which didn't make much sense then, except that slowly, with your friends adopting it, it turned into a habit.

Well, we at Whereabout just made a little under 200 people imagine that in the past one week. While Whatsapp was disrupting SMSes, we are doing our bit to disrupt those intrusive friend requests! You don't need to give access to your private Facebook profile (and all those pouty photos) to a relatively unknown friend of a friend anymore, who added you because they just felt like adding you. If they really have a point to make, instead of stalking, they should do some talking. What's the correct approach? Well, let's see how it's done in the real world: people knock on your door, speak with you & then you're done! Whereabout enables just that. If they have impressed you enough, you move over to Whatsapp or Facebook. Else, bye bye. The place in your friend list should be earned, in our opinion, especially after how crowded it has become.

I plan to publish our weekly stats to tell you about our journey here on, and elicit your ideas in making Whereabout something more useful with time. It will also keep us on toes to perform better than the previous day, following the business philosophy of Kaizen or continuous improvement. Here are the stats after 5 days of operation:

245 sign-ups,
452 knocks
3433 messages exchanged.

Every time we log into our app's analytics, we find 7-15 odd people online, chatting with their friends of friends. This engaged activity has now become a common sight, and we are delighted to have been able to steal away almost 15 to 20 minutes from Facebook & Whatsapp on a daily basis:

I won't ask you to download our app, since the early adopters will make you do so sooner or later, but do check our website. We did something creative there. Our website is structured like an investment deck: https://whereabout.in

Hope to hear from you soon.