All users could do was update their statuses, which could be seen by other people in their network.

When the first version of WhatsApp was launched, it wasn’t even a messaging app.

This was back when the Apple App store had only been around six months since its launch on 10th July 2008. WhatsApp was born in January 2009, after the founders purchased an iPhone & realized that the app industry was an untapped market poised to grow. In the period between leaving Yahoo and starting WhatsApp, both of them even applied for jobs in Facebook but got rejected. And while we do all this, we will discuss all the significant directional changes, because without all that context, just learning about ‘How does WhatsApp Make Money’ would be a waste of your time.īefore starting WhatsApp in 2009, both Jan Kaoum & Brian Acton, worked together at Yahoo for 9 years, from 1998 to 2007. In this piece, I will trace the journey of WhatsApp - the product, the monetization mechanisms it used early on, the ones it uses currently, and the ones it plans to use in the future.

While WhatsApp thrived under Facebook, growing from 450 million monthly active users at the time of acquisition in 2014 to over 2 billion monthly active users, the founders ended up leaving Facebook over disagreements on the monetization direction of WhatsApp, with one of them not even sticking around for his shares to vest.

Started by two founders who hated advertising and were passionately pro-privacy, WhatsApp ended in the hands of Facebook - the one big tech giant that is least revered for user privacy. WhatsApp, the product, has had a crazy journey, and I mean that, like literally.

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