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Jan Koum Didn't Invent WhatsApp Messaging. His Users Did.

By Jan Koum · Product & Building · 1 min read

People were using WhatsApp's status updates as a communication method. They wrote in and said — you're 90% there, just pipe it together. Koum said: we got nothing to lose.

Key Points

WhatsApp started as a status update app — users discovered they could communicate through push notifications
Users told them: you already know who uses WhatsApp, you already use push notifications — you're 90% there
SMS was expensive, unreliable, 20 years old, and cross-border messaging cost almost a euro per message

We got nothing to lose, so we'll try that. Turned out that was actually the problem that had to be solved.

Users Turned Status Into Messaging

Koum: When Apple introduced push notifications, we introduced a feature where if you change your status, it could go out to all your contacts — like a broadcast. We noticed that some people were actually using it as a communication method.

People would write in and say — look, you kind of have this way for me to communicate with my friends using push notifications. Meanwhile I'm paying 25 euro cents for a text message. Why don't you just pipe it together? You're 90% there. You already know who in the address book uses WhatsApp. You're already using push notifications.

People said — you're 90% there. You already use push notifications. Just pipe it together.

We Got Nothing to Lose

Koum: We said — well yeah, we got nothing to lose. So we'll try that. And we did.

Turned out that was actually the problem that had to be solved. SMS was really expensive. Unreliable. 20 years old. Very limited. Imagine trying to message across borders — all of a sudden you have to pay almost a euro for a message. It was ridiculous.

All of a sudden we realized we were solving a problem for people. And then it just took off.

We got nothing to lose. Turned out that was the problem that had to be solved. Then it just took off.