Back
Harsh Dwivedi
Ā ā¢Ā
MedialĀ ā¢Ā 12d
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum explains why he charged $1 for the product to intentionally slow growth Sam Altman recalls: āI remember in 2011, people would say WhatsApp is never going to work because they charge a dollar and itās a viral app and thatās just going to kill it right there.ā But Jan explains that charging $1 was a very intentional lever WhatsApp used to slow growth: āI know it sounds very counterintuitive - why would you want to slow your growth? We wanted to slow our growth so we could better support our existing users. So we could build servers that donāt crash. So that we could build a product that doesnāt drop messages. So that we could answer their customer support emails.ā A lot of people told Jan and the WhatsApp team this was a bad strategy, but Jan compares it to what Facebook did in the early days: āThey were doing colleges only, and they werenāt open to the entire world.ā WhatsApp wanted to do the same thing: āWe wanted to make sure that we have our existing users happy, and that when people sign up, they have a great experience, and that the app works, and itās fast, and the servers are up and running all the time. And I think that worked for us because we were really able to focus on the product.ā Video source: @ycombinator (2014)
Replies (4)
More like this
Recommendations from Medial
Somen's 8D world
Hey I am on MedialĀ ā¢Ā 29d
i fixed some of the stability issues of my cicd tool . i need some feedback. https://cicd.rf.gd for context it's a tool which allows setting and running up the servers in plain shell scripts. it will be connected to github and sync you code no matt
See More
Download the medial app to read full posts, comements and news.