Alex Fishman (WhatsApp, Bugsee)

Questions for Alex Fishman

Big-picture overview of things I'm curious about:
- Questions about WhatsApp
  - Questions about before January 2009
    - When did you get an iPhone?
    - What iPhone projects had you worked on with Igor?
    - Did Jan have any kind of smart phone (like a Blackberry) before he got an iPhone?
  - Questions about those first six-twelve months (2009)
    - I'm just very interested in what that period from January to June 2009 looked like. I don't feel like I have a very clear picture of what was going on in that period.
      - Coming up with the idea
        Did Jan get the idea for a messaging service only after
        How familiar was Jan with the messaging
        How close was Jan to those other friends that you had at those get-togethers?
      - How long did it take to create the first version of the app? ~1-2 months? More?
      - Early adopters
        How many early adopters were there?
        What did that growth look like in the first few weeks?
        How were people finding out about it?
        What would someone use the app for if no one they knew was using it?
      - Early versions of the app
        Does he have pictures of it?
        What actions, exactly, could a user take?
        What was the thinking for the MVP? Just statuses?
    - Questions about the second six months
      - The Forbes(?) article suggests that the first version of WhatsApp that included push notifications didn't have person-to-person notifications; is that right? It was only Twitter-style, one-to-many notifications?
    - Managing / hiring
      - What he looks for in developers / how he knew that Igor was a good developer.
        On the other hand, it looks like the SMS-fee problem they were solving was so painful for users that the execution wasn't crucial. So they just needed someone reasonably competent and reliable.
      - How to manage remote developers / how to work with remote developers - What exactly does his process look like?
    - How Alex / Jan were able to get people to use the initial version.
      - Although it seems that apps are often able to get a bunch of people using their initial versions; the issue is that those apps often aren't fixing an ongoing problem, and so people don't return to the app. Whereas with WhatsApp, people were already using SMS, and paying those SMS fees was an ongoing annoyance. So users had a strong incentive to switch.
  - Questions about before / after that period
- Questions not about WhatsApp
  - Questions about Alex's start-ups
  - Ask Alex if he's heard about Aubrey de Grey, see if he can get Jan to look into it.

Medium - @fishman
- 2015.07.28 - Thoughts on Dishero
  - "Dishero isn’t working. We have built a great team and phenomenal engineering, but failed in scaling up the business. What I learnt is selling to restaurants is an extremely painful process...The business model has been proven to be difficult to scale. (...) What’s next? Option A: Continue to iterate on the current product & sales strategies/tactics. (...) Option B: Pivot within the restaurant industry (...) Option C: Pivot outside of the restaurant industry"
- 2016.06.16 - My Cofounder Said “I love what we’re doing” And We Shut Down Our Startup
  - "Dishero was founded by Ilya Ginzburg, Dmitry Fink and myself with the goal to replace the paper menus and give restaurants full control over their online presence. Our business was seemingly working and from 30K feet — it looked great. (...) But here is the thing — mediocre success is worse than failure. Much worse. When things work out great — it’s obvious what to do. When things don’t work out at all — it sucks, but again, it’s clear what to do. However, there are no obvious answers when you are stuck right in the middle. (...) Here’s our big insight / little secret — selling to restaurants is a dead end. (...) Running a restaurant is hard for a host of reasons that I could’ve never imagined. (...) Dishero might’ve had a good set of products, but not good enough to overcome these industry challenges. A year of iterations failed to nail a must-have product. No sales or growth hacking tactics could have ever changed that."
  - In July 2015, we assembled the executive team to discuss the situation at hand. (...)
  - Email from one of his investors: "If you’re going to do anything within the restaurant industry, IMHO it would have to be done in such a way that the restaurants come to you and you don’t have to go and sell to them. Otherwise the cost of customer acquisition with a sales team ends up being way too high, slow to scale, and just painful."
    - I just got done watching talks by Gabe Leydon where he talked about the strategy used by Game of War, which was heavy on advertising. So that may have worked here.
  - They ended up deciding to keep the engineering team and lay off the sales team to pivot.
  - "Every day we deal with equally important, yet conflicting pieces of advice. For instance, early bird gets the worm, yet second mouse gets the cheese. For a startup CEO, the choice is always between don’t give up and fail fast. How do you decide? Well, if you didn’t give up for a really long time, and you’re still not there, maybe it’s time to fail fast. Really fast. Running a slowly dying business into the ground is worse. Much worse."
    - IMO the answer is that the best approach depends on the situation. You have to pay very close attention to the circumstances to try to predict which approach is better.
- 2016.07.16 - How to Shut Down a Startup in 36 Hours
  - "Call every single investor (another reason not to take 51 checks of $5K each). While it’s not always possible, ideally, do it before you inform your team. (...) Have a list of each service your team uses (...) [Deal with health insurance and Worker's Compensation insurance.] (...) If you’re shutting down before you run out of money, you should consider paying severance to the team. (...) [Use eShares to handle equity issues.] (...) [Use Gusto to handle payroll.] (...) [Deal with the government unemployment office.] (...) [Prepare the day before notifying the employees by printing out all the documents you'll need to give to your employees.] (...) [Notify the employees.]"
- 2016.08.09 - Imagine Yesterday
  - "You can analyze successes of others all day long, but the reality is — there are no recipes for these things."
  - "before smiling will have any impact, you must have something interesting to say. (...) You may A/B test “Buy” vs. “Buy Now” on your checkout button. However, if your customers aren’t interested in your product — it won’t matter. You may optimize the size and the location of your share button. However, if you do not have shareable content — it won’t matter. On the flip side, if you do have shareable content — people will find a way to share it. Growth hacking and A/B testing are important only once you have a large user-base, where every percentage point uptick in conversion results in a significant impact. And then, only then, size and colors of the buttons start to matter. As well as timing of the push notifications. (...) Your time is better spent building a hit product, that customers use and tell their friends about."
    - Main idea: Don't pre-optimize / over-engineer.
  - "if you have 10 daily active users today, and your engagement grows daily by 1%, you’ll have 14,276 DAU in two years."
    - Main idea: Small optimizations that lead to 1% growth per day aren't going to lead to huge numbers of users.
  - Success recipes: There are none. All we know is the four required ingredients:
    - Hard work
    - Conviction
    - Patience
    - A bit of luck
  - "I once attended a conference where a prominent speaker explained the meteoric success of WhatsApp. He attributed it to the human psychology, yearning for communication, the intimate nature of messaging, and the timing of push notifications. The claim seems quite plausible on its face. However, here is what the speaker was forgetting in his analysis: 1) There’re scores of other messaging apps with a similar feature set, 2) SMS existed a decade beforehand, 3) On the day WhatsApp was just born, we all were already sending billions of intimate SMS messages every single day. It was painful to see him reducing WhatsApp to a red notification indicator. The speaker then explained how infinite scroll, with its easiness and addictiveness, was instrumental to Facebook and Instagram’s successes. Again, such a gross oversimplification of these services."
  - "I’m not saying album covers or packaging aren’t important or easy to design. Nor I am saying that studying others’ work isn’t inspiring or necessarily a waste of time. My main point is — none of it will actually help you to compose a timeless piece. There are no recipes for that."
- 2016.08.11 - Song References
  - This is just a list of song references in the "Imagine Yesterday" article.
- 2016.08.29 - A Post About Post-Post-Mortem
  - Summary: He discusses the period of time between working on Dishero and starting Bugsee, where he had to give a postmortem at his VC fund's office and then figure out what to do next.
  - "I should’ve realized that me running sales wasn’t our biggest problem. We didn’t have a good enough product. No sales expertise could’ve overcome it. I should’ve continued to evolve our product instead. (...) Scaling before nailing a product market fit mistake should’ve been easy to avoid . Alas, it is what it is."
  - They had to figure out what to do next: "Some claim that ideas do not matter, and it is all about the team and execution. (...) However, when that’s the only thing that’s missing, ideas do matter."
  - if you think about it, finding and committing to an idea is analogous to finding, falling in love and marrying a person. Both demand:
    Excitement about it today and years from now
    Believing in a long term chance of success
    Commitment to persevere through unpredictable, yet inevitable, challenges ahead
    Blessing by parents/investors
    As hard as it is already, we also had a 110 day deadline. One cannot always find a girl/boyfriend in 110 days. Maybe a solid second date. But marriage?
  - "Per Manu’s suggestion, Dmitry and I, each made a list of existing companies that we could imagine building. It was encouraging to realize that we saw things eye to eye, as our lists had almost 80% overlap. (...) We had two groups of ideas. Those we’ve conceived ourselves and ideas we explored based on conversations with others. (...) We tried to categorize them by the type of business and our knowledge of the space. Then we had to make sure both of us were sufficiently excited about the idea to start researching it further. (...) One of the azimuths we explored was the specific challenges we had faced at our first company. We looked at the actual pains we had experienced and studied potential solutions. One of these deep dives led us to build Bugsee..."
- 2016.08.31 - How NOT to Raise Money
  - This is more about how to ask for an introduction to an investor.
  - [Inappropriate requests for intros] share a common trait: I don’t/barely know them and they ask me to introduce them to local big shots.
  - For me to introduce you to anyone, I first must know you well. So I can vouch for you. In no other circumstances I can make an introduction. Regardless how cool your project is.
  - You are always taking a risk when making an introduction. If the intro is a waste of time, it’ll affect your own reputation, putting your social capital at risk. Do it too often and you are out of the networking game. The only way to mitigate that risk is to know both parties well to ensure it is indeed a valuable match.
  - If someone agrees to introduce you without writing two meaningful paragraphs about you, then chances are, you won’t see any benefit from that intro.
  - Summary: Research the person you are looking to be introduced to. Then, find the best person in your network that can connect the dots for you. The connector should already know you well, so don’t sell yourself. Instead, sell them the benefits both sides may reap in case of a successful match. Your connector will be happy to take the credit for a great match and gladly intro you.
- 2016.09.01 - Raising Money — Where to Start?
  - "I’d like to share a framework that had helped me to raise the funds for a startup that we had shutdown and later restarted with the remaining capital. (...) I thought of fundraising as selling technology products to Samsung. Why? Because that’s exactly what I did in my previous life. Once I started thinking in these terms, it got a bit easier. (...) When selling to Samsung, you must first identify your champion. They must fully comprehend what you offer, so later they can sell your story internally. (...) The champion’s career is on the line here...So your product’s success and your champion’s career are somewhat aligned. (...) Once the champion is fully sold on your product, they go to their Samsung colleagues to tell your story. The champion arranges a meeting for you to present to a larger Samsung audience. (...) [Check out] "The Selling Fox: A Field Guide for Dynamic Sales Performance. (...) Once you’re done presenting, you leave the room. The champion stays there and continues to advocate your product to their Samsung colleagues on your behalf. (...) If you did your homework and armed the champion with all the necessary tools, they will help you to seal the deal."
  - This one was pretty helpful.
- 2013.09.13 - Camera-Killing Smartphones And Their Killer Cameras
  - "[M]obile phones’ cameras are making giant technological leaps. (...) I worked in the digital camera industry for 16 years...[T]he industry was fine up until 2012, where it collapsed in one year and never recovered. As predicted. (...) What killed the digital camera industry was...Instagram. Or more accurately, the insta part. (...) Cameras could not deliver you likes and comments within minutes of you taking the shot. Customers traded image quality for instant feedback. (...) [S]ome companies figured out that there are certain places where you simply won’t take your phone to. These are the brilliant DropCam and GoPro."
- 2016.10.28 - The Deciding Deep Dive
  - "The mobile apps at our previous venture had bugs. (...) Reporting these bugs to our dev team was often a challenge. So Dmitry and I tried to recall our typical flow. (...) What exactly did the user do to get to that particular case? What else the system was doing at the same time? The historical context was crucial in some difficult crash cases. (...) We needed an all-encompassing bug and crash reporting mechanism. It had to continuously record (and store locally) all app screens, touch events and all network traffic. This way, if a problem occurs, everything has already been recorded. So there is no need to reproduce the problematic sequence. (...) Competitive analysis showed that there are two big players in the space of crash reporting and several small players offer some subset of in-app bug reporting functionality. (...) We met with all our previous investors, showed them the demo and the deck with all the collected feedback. It took us some time to answer all their questions, but we did get their necessary commitments. (...) During the New Years break, we started to deal with the legal aspects of transitioning one company into another. (...) Perhaps the most difficult part of the restarting journey was probably lack of tangible deliverables. Throughout our entire careers, Dmitry and I used to build things. And now, for the past several months, every Friday we’d look back at the past week and what did we do? We had been only thinking, googling and excelling (Microsoft kind)…"
- 2016.11.16 - App development, bug reporting, and more in this GeekSpeak podcast with Bugsee
  - Alex's summary: "We started with the importance of titles in a startup, then went to talk about our early days working in embedded space with cameras, DVDs and phones. Then talked through our previous adventure and how it eventually, with a bit of help from Goldman Sachs, led us to the birth of Bugsee. We covered a range of technical topics, such as recording video in production apps, its impact on UI and phone’s CPU, full network communication logging, why we use AWS and method swizzling in SWIFT. We also touched upon some of the business challenges at the end."
  - "Alex: We started working together at a company in Israel called Zoran. (...) We are eight people right now."
  - How’d you come up with wanting to be in the bug reporting and analysis space?
    - A: (He gives a lot of background on Dishero, all stuff that he says in his blog posts). Atlassian had just IPO'd and we read Goldman Sachs' analysis of the developer-tools industry, which helped convince us it was a good industry to sell into.
  - He explains the idea as he would've pitched it to the VCs and also for a general public. All standard info.
  - There’re three phases of development. There is internal development, and then there is beta testing, as like what you alluded to, as well as live in the app store. They’re very different phases, and you expect different kind of reports. So that’s one aspect.
    
    The other aspect, there are two kinds of problems. One kind of problem that you see with your eyes, like a picture didn’t load, didn’t do what you expected, unintuitive UI or a misspelled text. Other kind of problem, the app just crashes. It just dies on you. No warning, no nothing, just boom, dies. So in all of these cases, Bugsee reports to you one minute of video that led up to the problem.
  - They go in-depth on how it works.
    - Lyle: Okay. That’s pretty cool. My day job is working at Netflix. I’m an engineer on the iOS app. We’re very conscious of privacy of the users. And in general, inspecting what they’re doing or looking over their shoulder without notifying them, would feel — something we’d definitely discuss, whether it would be a good idea to do that. Even though, of course, all the image assets and everything that they’re doing we’re delivering to them.
      Some applications like a web browser that would do this kind of thing could have a lot of privacy concerns. That an end user might be looking at their email and it crashes. And all of a sudden you’ve got a picture of their email. So how to you decide on — do you have best practices for your developers?
      Alex: Absolutely. So first of all, Bugsee automatically removes every secure field from the system. So whether it’s a password, whether it’s a credit card, whether it’s the picture from the camera from the phone, whatever is considered to be secure — is automatically removed. That’s all within this one line of code integration.
      Lyle: Okay. Right. So you’ve made sure that some of the things you can detect are private, just turn it off.
      Alex: Yes.
      Lyle: That way it won’t log it. I don’t really care what it is anyway, because that’s not going to solve the problem.
      Alex: Exactly. And it doesn’t even leave the phone. So it’s not like it goes to our servers and there we process it. It doesn’t even leave the phone. So it’s very, very secure on that front. And on top of that, we offer you APIs where you know that certain screens should not be recorded, and you preemptively can disable Bugsee in certain screens.
    - Lyle: I can imagine my little buzzing in my engineer brain is saying you’re recording video all the time and tossing it all the time. Isn’t that a bit of processor time and a bit of memory and a bit of disc space? I mean how are you doing that efficiently enough to always be running a ten-second video? Dmitry?
      Dmitry: When it comes to space we are talking about one minute video, so it’s couple of megabytes. It shouldn’t be a concern. Obviously, CPU is being consumed, but we’ve spent a lot of time fine-tuning and optimizing our solution. We actually have some know-how in the area.
  - They talk about how they're making money
    - "we’re talking to our customers and asking them what makes sense to them, what would they pay. A lot of customers reply to us with phenomenally positive feedback. And that’s a beautiful opportunity to ask you what would you pay for that? And we collect all that information."
  - we have two cofounders. We have one iOS guy, one android guy, one web guy, and two designers.
  - Lyle: Yeah, that’s important. Right. So with Apple and their sensitivity to anything that they’re not expecting you to do with the development, the whole app store review process there’s tons of stories when they release a new iOS version, that a developer has done something clever with an API, and they go oh, no, that wasn’t intentional. And they deny their app being deployed. How sensitive are you guys to that and how do you know that your pattern of what you’re planning on doing will fit nicely with Apple. Is that a risk that you have?
    Dmitry: There is probably some risk, always. For now, we haven’t seen any problems with the way we do things. (
  - Lyle: Okay. So let’s talk about a competitor. I know that other companies are actually doing video recording, because when I was doing some research I noticed a list of them that are doing this. What differentiates you or is the space just large enough you’re not concerned about? From a business perspective what are your concerns or issues for that?
    Alex: Well, obviously, we’re familiar with the space, and there’re other players in the space. So from what we know there are no player out there that delivers the quality of video that we do without slowing down the UI and passing app store certification. Basically, there are 3 ways to record video in iOS. (...) We worked really hard to develop a fourth way, which is basically doesn’t slow down the UI, passes Apple certification, uses only legitimate APIs, and totally, totally usable. And we have many customers in the app store using that.
  - Alex goes to meetups once a week to meet developers and spread awareness.
  - we’re talking about 4.5 months, and we have 797 customers signed up with pushing about 1,000 developers, and about a quarter of them use it in past 30 days.
  - Lyle: Are you seeing a difference in your last company versus this one? Because you guys just did this, and closed it. At this timeframe from the menu company, six months out, how different are they?
    Alex: Oh, it’s a very, very different. We have something to compare it to. So we see our customers signing up. We see customers signing up because their friends told them because they use Bugsee and they want them to use it as well. Obviously, it’s free, so that makes it even easier at this point.
  - Alex: I’m running marketing, and I’m not a marketeer in any shape or form. So I do an occasional experiment here and there with the sponsor starting in newsletters or podcasts and see how that works out. So we still experiment with that.

check out my medium blog on medium.com/@fishman. I think I have 8-9 stories there. Probably the most relevant ones here are

1. My Cofounder Said “I love what we’re doing” And We Shut Down Our Startup (this one went viral on hacker news, WSJ and tons of other places)
2. How to Shut Down a Startup in 36 Hours
3. A Post About Post-Post-Mortem
4. The Deciding Deep Dive