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> At the end of the day, I sold my company. I am a sellout. I acknowledge that I think he's acknowledging that his company was un-monetizable and selling was o

> At the end of the day, I sold my company. I am a sellout. I acknowledge that I think he's acknowledging that his company was un-monetizable and selling was obviously the best thing they could do. And 10 years later, it remains unmonetizable, that's sad.

s_dev 8y ago
Didn't WhatsApp used to charge a dollar a year?
- hackandtrip 8y ago
  That would have stopped working in a few years: nowadays lot of different people stopped using WhatsApp almost entirely using Facebook Messanger / Telegram / etc. 1$/year is just too low-proft and too risky
  - s_dev 8y ago
    >1$/year is just too low-proft Thats moving goal posts -- the claim was that WhatsApp was unmonetizable not that it could generate super normal profits.
    - hackandtrip 8y ago
      Unmonetizable and "super normal profits" for a 19B product can be really close in the scale used by business people
jamesmcnalley 8y ago
Monetization is really hard. The ‘90s was filled with the wreckage of companies that couldn’t get it right, with debris spreading out into the early ‘00s. The ad monetization model is one way to do it, and it can be rolled out to a wide variety of products, but it is unlikely to be the only model. Business is hard, and it can take a long time and many failures to be truly innovative. I’m an engineer, but I’m a little sad that so few people with strong business backgrounds are trying new things. Maybe in another decade or two.
- overcast 8y ago
  I guess the lesson here is to stop making a business out of burning venture capital, and start with a real business plan. There are plenty out that are building things people are willing to pay for. WhatsApp is super popular, because you're giving away the worlds 100th iteration of a chat client for free.
sangnoir 8y ago
> I think he's acknowledging that his company was un-monetizable and selling was obviously the best thing they could do That's wrong - WhatsApp was monetized - IIRC, they had 200 million users (and growing) and a staff complement of 50[1]. They could have been easily profitable even if a fraction of their users then paid $1/year, or charged Businesses or bots. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive...

s_dev 8y ago

Didn't WhatsApp used to charge a dollar a year?

hackandtrip 8y ago
That would have stopped working in a few years: nowadays lot of different people stopped using WhatsApp almost entirely using Facebook Messanger / Telegram / etc. 1$/year is just too low-proft and too risky
- s_dev 8y ago
  >1$/year is just too low-proft Thats moving goal posts -- the claim was that WhatsApp was unmonetizable not that it could generate super normal profits.
  - hackandtrip 8y ago
    Unmonetizable and "super normal profits" for a 19B product can be really close in the scale used by business people

jamesmcnalley 8y ago

Monetization is really hard. The ‘90s was filled with the wreckage of companies that couldn’t get it right, with debris spreading out into the early ‘00s. The ad monetization model is one way to do it, and it can be rolled out to a wide variety of products, but it is unlikely to be the only model. Business is hard, and it can take a long time and many failures to be truly innovative. I’m an engineer, but I’m a little sad that so few people with strong business backgrounds are trying new things. Maybe in another decade or two.

overcast 8y ago
I guess the lesson here is to stop making a business out of burning venture capital, and start with a real business plan. There are plenty out that are building things people are willing to pay for. WhatsApp is super popular, because you're giving away the worlds 100th iteration of a chat client for free.

sangnoir 8y ago

> I think he's acknowledging that his company was un-monetizable and selling was obviously the best thing they could do That's wrong - WhatsApp was monetized - IIRC, they had 200 million users (and growing) and a staff complement of 50[1]. They could have been easily profitable even if a fraction of their users then paid $1/year, or charged Businesses or bots. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive...