alt Hacker NewsHave you considered that you may be making the surface-level analysis? I paid $3 for Whatsapp in 2010 on the Blackberry app store. They had a staff of ~20 people handling messages across almost 200 countries.It became the defacto global messaging app because it was available on every single platform, not just the Apple/Google duopoly VCs cared about.
Replies
mtlynch • 06/17/2025
>I paid $3 for Whatsapp in 2010 on the Blackberry app store.
A $3 one-time payment (which I'm guessing is about $2.75 after BlackBerry app store fees) is not sustainable for lifetime access and updates on a service that needs 4-5 nines of service availability and data integrity.
lou1306 • 06/17/2025
They also ran on Symbian and Windows Phone. I know because I used both ports.
Sorry, but the original commenter is correct. They received relatively small amounts of seed funding in 2009 and later charged a nominal amount to cover text verification, but they still were a classic VC-funded play: receive tens of millions in VC dollars to operate at a loss for years to build market dominance. From the Wikipedia page:
> In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiation by Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[63][64][65]
> By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.[26] Some time in 2013[66] WhatsApp acquired Santa Clara–based startup SkyMobius, the developers of Vtok,[67] a video and voice calling app.[68]
> In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month.[69] The year 2013 ended with $148 million in expenses, of which $138 million in losses.
I mean, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for billions, what did people expect? How else were they going to monetize?