WhatsApp – The power of product focus
Product Focus
WhatsApp is a tiny startup, with only around 50 employees, yet has managed to take their simple, basic messaging product to huge scale. It has over 450 million monthly active users, 72% of whom are active every day. Staggeringly, their messaging volume rivals the global SMS volume – estimated at 7 trillion messages per year. And with over 1 million new users per day they're still growing like mad.
“WhatsApp’s extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.” Jan Koum, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO
Unlike most start-ups, this incredible growth has been achieved without any marketing – they have spent exactly $0 on user acquisition and don't have a PR or marketer on staff or even a sign outside their office. 35 of their employees are engineers and the rest are in customer support.
This makes WhatsApp perhaps the clearest example of the success of single-minded product focus. From day one they have focused on making the best messaging app and every feature and improvement that has followed has been in service of that goal. When they introduced voice messaging in 2013 it was a simple extension of the existing messaging tools, with a supremely simple one-click implementation that bested the combined efforts of google, facebook and twitter.
“The number of taps matters. People want to send a message and be on their way."
Free isn't always good
WhatsApp has managed to achieve their staggering growth in part because they've eschewed the traditional free or freemium model in mobile apps. Their app is free to download, and costs just 99 cents per user after the first year. This has meant that they've been able to avoid monetising their app through advertising – something that would have detracted from the user experience of the product.
“Utilities get out of the way. Can you imagine if you flipped a light switch and had to watch an ad before you got electricity? Can you imagine if you turned on a faucet and had to watch an ad before the water came out?” Jan Koum, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO
What does the future hold?
It will be really interesting to see how this integrates into the Facebook ecosystem over time – will it replace messages and their dedicated messaging app? Will it serve as a bulwark against other chat apps like Snapchat to ensure that teens who grow up on chat apps move their social graph onto Facebook itself once their social networking use changes?
Either way Facebook just paid over $40 per user because they believe WhatsApp will continue to grow to a billion users or more – and that's all thanks to that single-minded product focus.
Do one thing, and do it well.
About the author
Martin Eriksson
Martin Eriksson has 25+ years experience building world-class online products in both corporate and start-up environments for global brands such as Monster, Financial Times, Huddle, and Covestor. He is the Founder of ProductTank, the Co-Founder and Curator of Mind the Product, and a Product Partner at leading venture capital fund EQT Ventures. He is also the author of the best-seller Product Leadership, How Top Product Leaders Launch Great Products and Build Successful Teams (O'Reilly, 2017).
