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Whatsapp who owns12/21/2023 ![]() ![]() It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.”īesides marketing, the founding pair was also dusting away all the meeting requests from VCs interested in investing. In fact, when asked why isn’t Jan boasting about this success, he replied – Their main focus was their product which seemed sustainable with its $1 paid model as WhatsApp was among the list of top 20 applications on App Store in 2011. Jan & Brian were not actually a fan of marketing and press. Later, support for Symbian OS, Android, and Windows OS was added within two years. It’s a dead technology like a fax machine left over from the seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers.” – Jan told himĮven though Chris still had doubts, he joined the team by being fascinated by the eye-popping user growth. The USA, in fact, is the worst-performing market for Whatsapp till now.īut Koum and Acton had plans to take this app to the world outside of the USA, like Europe and Asia, where people’s texts were actually metered. Jan soon hired one of his friends, Chris Peiffer, to make the BlackBerry version of the application, which they launched two months later.īut Chris, like many others living in the USA, had a doubt-Įven during 2009, flat rates for SMS and free minutes were offered by almost every mobile operator, and there was almost no incentive for people in the USA to shift to WhatsApp. It stood out as a perfect alternative to sending SMS within the country and even internationally (for free).Īs soon as the application was launched, the founding pair was flooded with emails from iPhone users asking about the future prospects of the application and if it was being launched for Nokia and BlackBerry as well, as they were the market players at that time. The beta stage ended, and the application was exclusively launched on the App Store for iPhone in November 2009. We just wanted to build a product that people used,” – Koum during an onstage panel discussion.īrian Acton officially joined WhatsApp on 1st November. This was a huge boost to WhatsApp as it not only got good funding but also a very experienced cofounder. “You had the whole open-ended bounty of the Internet to work with,” It was in October 2009.īefore this, he was actively looking for some other startup idea to work with until Jan came to him with his WhatsApp 2.0 version, to which he replied – “Being able to reach somebody halfway across the world instantly, on a device that is always with you, was powerful,” – Jan Koumīrian Acton was not an active member of the WhatsApp team until he convinced five ex-Yahoo! friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding. This is how version 2.0 came into existence. Jan recognised this accidental opportunity at his town-house in Santa Clara and soon realised the need for upgrading the operating model of the status app to an internet-based instant messaging application. ![]() ![]() In no time, this feature became a channel for instant messaging, and users started chatting with each other through statuses like someone would post “What’s up, Karen?” and Karen would reply by changing her status. Jan capitalised on this update and did some alterations to Whatsapp, which sent push notifications to friends whenever a user changed his status on the application.įishman’s Russian friends found it fun and started using it to update their own whereabouts and ping each of their friends with statuses like – “I woke late” or “Can’t talk, I’m at the gym”. The motive behind this update was to remind the users when they are not using an installed application. In June 2009, Apple launched the push notifications update. At that time, Acton encouraged by saying – made Koum so disappointed that he lost all the hope and started to look for a new job. Moreover, issues like battery draining, crashing of the app, etc. He demoed WhatsApp to some friends, including Fisherman, but none of them liked it. He named it ‘WhatsApp’ because it sounded more like what’s up, which aligned with the idea of statuses. Koum succeeded in developing the iOS application and incorporated the ‘WhatsApp inc.’ in California on 24th February 2009 The beginning of the journey was not a smooth one, but they paved their way through like many other successful entrepreneurs. So, Alex introduced them to a Russian developer, Igor Solomennikov, whom he found on. But executing this idea was impossible without the help of an iOS developer. Koum discussed the idea with Acton, and both started visiting Alex Fishman for more insights. He wanted to build an app that shows statuses next to the individual names of the users. Jan Koum bought an iPhone in January 2009 and soon realised the app industry’s potential on few months old App Store. ![]()
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