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 t

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