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  • WhatsApp Blog
    • The first blog entry is August 8, 2009, just two months after push notifications were enabled, and only one month after the first version of WhatsApp to use push notifications.
    • From this blog post it seems that Jan was the one writing the blog entries: the command prompt entries start with "jkb@c123$", and I'm guessing jkb refers to Jan Koum. [Later: Also, this blog post, "Brian and I"]
    • 2012.06.18 - Why we don't sell ads
      • "At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world."
    • 2013.07.17 - iPhone v2.10.1 release notes
      • "As you know, we used to charge iPhone users a $.99 one time payment, while Android and other platforms had free service for the first year and paid $0.99 a year after that. From now on, we've simplified our business model so that all users on all platforms will enjoy their first year of WhatsApp service for free, and only pay $.99 per year after that. (...) The good news for all current iPhone users is that WhatsApp will be free of charge for the rest of your life."
  • AppAnnie - WhatsApp
  • Wikipedia - WhatsApp
    • Expand

      WhatsApp Inc., was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo!. After Koum and Acton left Yahoo! in September 2007, the duo travelled to South America as a break from work.[9] At one point they applied for a job at Facebook but were rejected.[9] For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo. In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing that the seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps, he started visiting his friend, Alex Fishman in West San Jose where the three would discuss "...having statuses next to individual names of the people," but this was not possible without an iPhone developer, so Fishman introduced Koum to Igor Solomennikov, a developer in Russia that he had found on RentACoder.com. Koum almost immediately chose the name "WhatsApp" because it sounded like "what’s up," and a week later on his birthday, on February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, early WhatsApp kept crashing or getting stuck and at a particular point. Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months."[9]

      In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, letting developers ping users when they were not using an app. Koum updated WhatsApp so that each time the user changed their statuses, it would ping everyone in the user's network.[9] WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the active users suddenly swelled to 250,000. Koum visited Acton, who was still unemployed while managing another unsuccessful startup and decided to join the company.[9] In October Acton persuaded five ex-Yahoo friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and as a result was granted co-founder status and a stake. He officially joined on November 1.[9] After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired an old friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to make the BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.[9]

      WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009 WhatsApp for the iPhone was updated to send photos. By early 2011, WhatsApp was in the top 20 of all apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.[9]

      In April 2011, the founders agreed to take $7 million from Sequoia Capital on top of their $250,000 seed funding, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[9] According to Goetz, the venture capital firm originally discovered WhatsApp through an App store tracking system they developed called 'early bird', at a time when the app was much more popular in other countries than in the US. However, it took months for the VC firm to track down Koum and Acton, given that the company didn't have a publicly available address nor signage at the time. All Goetz knew was that they were located in Mountain View, and Sequoia partners "literally walked the streets of Mountain View to see if [they] could intersect with [Koum and Acton]."[10]

      By February 2013, WhatsApp's user base had swelled to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50. Sequoia invested another $50 million, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion.[9]

      In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users use the service each month.[11] As of 22 April 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos are shared each day, and the messaging system handles more than 10 billion messages each day.[12] On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. WhatsApp added about 25 million new users every month or 833,000 active users per day.[4][13] With 65 million active users, about 10% of the total worldwide users, India is the largest single country in terms of number of users.[14]

      Acquisition by Facebook
      On February 19, 2014, months after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation,[15] Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date.[8] Facebook, which was advised by Allen & Co, paid $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders (advised by Morgan Stanley), Koum and Acton.[16] Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing.[8] The transaction was the largest purchase of a company backed by venture capitalists to date.[7] Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.[17][18]

  • GrowthHackers - WhatsApp
    • Expand

      After coming up with the initial idea, Koum was quick to choose the name WhatsApp because it sounds like “What’s up?” and he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. just a week later, on February 24th, 2009—his birthday. But WhatsApp wasn’t always a messaging service. After Koum kept missing phone calls while working out due to his gym’s rule barring cellphones, he came up with the idea of a mobile address book that displayed statuses next to contact names, so that friends could let one another know if they were available or at the gym, in a meeting, had a low phone battery, and so on. Around the same time, Koum’s Russian friend Alex Fishman held pizza and movie nights for the local Russian community—sometimes up to 40 people at a time—at his West San Jose home. On such nights, Koum talked to Fishman for hours about his app idea, and many of the app’s earliest adopters came from this group, including Alex Fishman. Once he’d downloaded the app, he met with Koum at Tony Roma’s in San Jose to go discuss the problems he’d encountered. Though a promising concept, the initial incarnation of WhatsApp tended to crash, and adoption was not instantaneous. In fact, early on Koum confessed to Acton (who had yet to sign on as a co-founder) that he was thinking of giving up and looking for a job. Acton advised Koum, “You’d be an idiot to quit now. Give it a few more months.” [12] As it turned out, Acton was right. It wasn’t long until Apple launched push notifications, which Koum incorporated into WhatsApp. In the newest incarnation, when users changed their statuses the app pinged everyone in their network via push notification. Users liked this function so much that they began using the app to ping one another, at which point Koum realized he had inadvertently created a mobile instant messenger. He explains, “Being able to reach somebody [halfway] across the world instantly, on a device that is always with you, was powerful.”[12] Seizing this opportunity, Koum released WhatsApp 2.0 with a more prominent messaging functionality, and the formerly lackluster user base quickly grew to 250,000—proving Acton right and letting Koum know he was on the right track.  [12]

Timeline of their success

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  • Generally relevant, no specific time
  • Time-specific articles
    • 2008.06.09 - Ars Technica - Ars at WWDC ’08: Live keynote coverage here!

      • -Unified push notification service for all developers, preserves battery life, maintains performance
        -The push stuff scales to many third-party services, one persistent connection needed
        -We have come up with a far better solution, we are providing a push notification service to all developers

    • 2008.08.19 - CyberSurge.org - Apple Pulls Push Notification From 2.1 Beta 4 SDK
      • "Applications like AIM and Twitterrific are dieing for functionality like this since both of them would benefit greatly from being able to send notifications to its users."
    • 2008.09.13 - RobertSDonovan.com - iPhone status screen mock-up
      • Image Added ← It specifically has an example of SMS being one of the push notifications.
    • 2008.11.25 - Gizmodo - Why Is Apple iPhone Push Notification Still Missing?

      • "As any BlackBerry user knows, push services allow the developer to implement functionality that is extremely useful. For example: An instant messenger program would be able to notify you whenever a new message is received, even while the application itself is not running. Think about it just like an SMS. Another example: A voice over IP application can receive a call and alert you right away, so you can pick it up like any normal telephone call. Or maybe return the call using the normal telephony service if you are not in a Wi-Fi spot.

        As you can imagine, this makes push notification a Holy Grail for users and developers alike. The only people who may not be happy about these are the carriers. After all, the idea of an instant messaging application with push notification services taking over their lucrative SMS business doesn't seem like a very good one."

    • 2009.01.28 - MacWorld - iPhone push notifications: dead and buried, or waiting in the wings?
    • 2009.01.28 - Ars Technica - iPhone push notifications: Apple needs to get them right
      • It is now nearly five months after Apple originally said it would release push notifications for the iPhone, a service that would allow third parties to send instant SMS-style alerts to their applications on the device.
      • The fundamental component of this push system is a single process that can run in the background of the iPhone OS and listen for notifications coming from the server, much like the Mail and SMS apps can listen for messages pushed in near real time. The system is designed to allow third-party applications and services to send notifications to an iPhone (such as when someone IMs you, or pings you on a social network), which would then be displayed in an SMS-like popup that allows the user to either act on the message (perhaps by opening an application) or dismiss them into some sort of a queue for taking action later.
      2009.09.13 - RobertSDonovan.com - iPhone status screen mock-up
      • Image Removed ← It specifically has an example of SMS being one of the push notifications.

Articles about BBMing prior to 2009

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