3 ms·

For comparison, Facebook had 3500 employees at the time of their IPO, and it's "just a website." Snapchat is many products: video ad platform, augmented reality

by barce 10y ago

For comparison, Facebook had 3500 employees at the time of their IPO, and it's "just a website." Snapchat is many products: video ad platform, augmented reality selfie app, broadcast platform via sunglasses, photo uploading app, and messaging app.

halite 10y ago
do we really want to get into this discussion? whatsapp had what Facebook had ÷ 100.
- niftich 10y ago
  According to the Forbes story [1][2] on WhatsApp's beginnings, the founders didn't focus on marketing. The app's features alone sold it plenty -- and the fact that the app was sold for real money helped them pay the bills. Furthermore, they intentionally limited the product's early memberbase to avoid scaling too fast for their resources. In other words, if the story is to be believed, they ran a pretty tight shop. I'd imagine that someone like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc, who makes the product at available $0 and has to devise a monetization scheme later will need to employ a fair amount of "soft skills" staff who can forge relationships with, say, advertisers, and gobs of staff to work on features, stability, capacity to achieve a point where their platforms attract and retain eyeballs. These are the sort of companies where an injection of VC money to rapidly scale is beneficial such that the product can achieve monetizable critical mass, to fill out the part between "2. ???" and "3. PROFIT!" [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-... [2] without paywall: https://www.quora.com/How-was-WhatsApp-built https://www.quora.com/How-was-WhatsApp-built
- argonaut 10y ago
  Whatsapp was also never profitable either. They almost didn't even bother to make money (the subscription thing is a misnomer since they waived it left and right). And by their own admission, they intentionally tried to slow user growth.

by barce 10y ago

halite 10y ago

do we really want to get into this discussion? whatsapp had what Facebook had ÷ 100.

niftich 10y ago
According to the Forbes story [1][2] on WhatsApp's beginnings, the founders didn't focus on marketing. The app's features alone sold it plenty -- and the fact that the app was sold for real money helped them pay the bills. Furthermore, they intentionally limited the product's early memberbase to avoid scaling too fast for their resources. In other words, if the story is to be believed, they ran a pretty tight shop. I'd imagine that someone like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc, who makes the product at available $0 and has to devise a monetization scheme later will need to employ a fair amount of "soft skills" staff who can forge relationships with, say, advertisers, and gobs of staff to work on features, stability, capacity to achieve a point where their platforms attract and retain eyeballs. These are the sort of companies where an injection of VC money to rapidly scale is beneficial such that the product can achieve monetizable critical mass, to fill out the part between "2. ???" and "3. PROFIT!" [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-... [2] without paywall: https://www.quora.com/How-was-WhatsApp-built https://www.quora.com/How-was-WhatsApp-built
argonaut 10y ago
Whatsapp was also never profitable either. They almost didn't even bother to make money (the subscription thing is a misnomer since they waived it left and right). And by their own admission, they intentionally tried to slow user growth.