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My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leade

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long), no account creation (your phone number is enough, thanks), no hidden ad engine, no hundreds of stupid features that product people stuff down in the name of experimentation. There are some leaders who want anything and everything: Throw 100 darts in the wall. Leave what sticks (don't touch or nurture it). Go back to throwing 100 more. The other guy does that? We want that too. Mobile? Yes. Desktop? Yes. Browser? Yes. Different affiliate channels? Yes. Custom features for B2B partners? Yes. Merchandizing? Yes. Build a mini Ad engine? Yes. Multi user profile management systems? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, every requirement is a go. The crucial difference is: What happens when you have a restricted pool of people, but insist on doing 100s of things? Some leaders simply treat this as an "org structure" problem, not a problem of focus. They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step – just so that more quantity of features can be seen on paper. This is how most startups are, except for those rare few which don't "talk" about focusing, but actually focus.

jeltz 5y ago
As an end user I think WhatsApp is a terrible product for some the reasons you mentioned (tied to phone number, no desktop client) but I cannot deny that it was the smart thing to do from a business perspective.
chpmrc 5y ago
> no hundreds of stupid features that product people stuff down in the name of experimentation. Amen to that!
tinus_hn 5y ago
Ultimately though WhatsApp ended up with a billion users and 0 revenue.
- hermanradtke 5y ago
  They charged $1 per year before Facebook removed the fee.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Not true. They were charging $1/year from users in the richer markets. They could easily reach hundreds of millions per year in revenue if they followed this model.
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    ~$30M revenue in 2014 from 600M users. The vast majority of people will leave your service if it goes from $0 to even $1. So no, I don't think they could "easily" scale that up.
    - vladoski 5y ago
      Yes, but when I was younger, everyone that I knew, even digital illiterate people, paid that fee. Why? Because WhatsApp was (and is) everywhere.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      It didn't go from $0 to $1. It was always "$0 to most, $1 for those that really didn't care about paying because they knew that anything else would have much higher real costs" Hell, If WhatsApp ever got to say "Facebook wants to buy us, but we are also considering changing to a pay-what-you-want model to avoid selling out", I'd easily give them $10/year without batting an eye.
- bryans 5y ago
  Except for that $19 billion exit. Companies don't need to be turning a profit anymore -- they just need to prove they can scale, and someone else will figure out how to monetize it after a buyout. Hell, you don't even need to be a startup aiming for a buyout anymore to get away with being financially incompetent. Reddit is about to file their IPO at a valuation of $10 billion, even though they've been losing money for nearly two decades and are noticeably (and unsuccessfully) scrambling to find any presentable evidence that they're not complete buffoons.
ryanSrich 5y ago
This is why, after being both an engineer and a product manager (and VP of Product), and now a CTO of a seed stage startup, I’m fairly convinced PdMs are unnecessary. At least for the the type of company I’d like to build (WhatsApp as a primary example of that). Off loading the founders vision to someone else is a failure of both communication and org structure (at the seed-SB stage). People may not think hiring their first PdM is offloading their vision, but it is. That person is going to come up with their own ideas, validate their own assumptions, and push for product updates that directly serve their own self interests. To think that this won’t happen is naive. What I’ve found works the best is hiring competent engineers, giving them adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  >> adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out. I wish more PM's thought like you.
  - toomanyrichies 5y ago
    Ditto. As an engineer, it feels like product managers often feel a need to keep cranking out new features as a way to justify their seat at the table. I would love to work in an engineering culture which found a way around that problem. If that means the job falls on me instead, so be it.
    - nickthemagicman 5y ago
      They had me at adequate design spec.
    - ryanSrich 5y ago
      > If that means the job falls on me instead, so be it. Precisely this. I don’t know when “engineer” turned into “order taker”. There’s no reason to have a Product Manager define and engineers work. Good engineers are more than capable of defining their own work.
austincheney 5y ago
This confuses the mistakes of a mature company. Different dynamics. For example Google had thousands of engineers back when they had only 3 products: search, auction, and AdWords. I remember Travelocity having over a thousand developers and not being able to redesign a webpage. Its deeper than a product problem. Its an execution problem. It’s the ability to do what works with great criticality opposed to what’s expected, standard, normal, or comforting.
that_guy_iain 5y ago
WhatsApp was originally a super simple product. Send and receive messages. It was fundamentally a solved problem. It was all about the fact you could send free messages in a world where sms cost 10 cents a message. It wasn't that their messages were faster, their messages were anything other than free. They had a year fee of $1. Which I never paid yet I used their service anyways. The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot.
- daanlo 5y ago
  In my recollection it wasn‘t about saving 10 cents in the beginning, but about saving 1-2$ per message, since one of the first use cases it enabled was free international texting. That was a HUGE benefit. All the first evangelists I knew were in long distance relationships ;)
- Jensson 5y ago
  > The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot. Tell that to Twitter. Whatsapp staying at 50 instead of growing to 5000 is impressive.
  - that_guy_iain 5y ago
    Different product. One is a social media network and one is a messaging app.
    - relaxing 5y ago
      You say that now, but Twitter also began as a way to send a quick message to your friends.
      - recursive 5y ago
        You used to be able to use it as a way to create a free self-managing SMS distribution list. Pretty cool, before I had phone with data capabilities. That was even a use case I understood. Now I feel too old to understand how to use twitter. But that can't be it. Much older people seem to have no problem.
ehPReth 5y ago
no iPad app either :/
- anshumankmr 5y ago
  The WABetaInfo account on Twitter said one is finally coming. And I think it seems likely considering we don't need the phone to be on while using Whatsapp Web.
amelius 5y ago
Uh yeah, but it was only possible to have such a simple product because they reached mass adoption. Without network effects, you've got to differentiate and thus add complexity to gain users.
- Spivak 5y ago
  But then how did they reach mass adoption in the first place? It’s not like they were a Swiss Army knife and before and stripped features once they got big.
  - amelius 5y ago
    That's a totally different question. A larger company such as Microsoft could have easily grabbed the market first, but they didn't.
    - abduhl 5y ago
      This comment flies in the face of actual history. While your point about Microsoft may be right (who knows with how they’ve ruined their messaging platforms?) it certainly doesn’t hold true for iMessage which came out in roughly the same timeframe as WhatsApp (2011 vs 2009).
      - saghm 5y ago
        iMessage still has yet to come to other platforms, and at least for a few years after the iPhone's launch, many people viewed it as a luxury product and were unlikely to spend the money to get one compared to cheaper phones (which WhatsApp supported).
  - et-al 5y ago
    They had fantastic product-market fit. As dleslie and that_guy_iain have mentioned, it was expensive to send an SMS text back then, especially in Europe when your friends have different country codes. So WhatsApp was a free alternative that tapped the unmet need for millions. And signing up with only a phone number seems like a nobrainer nowadays, but the mindset of the time was still email + password. Sure, Microsoft could have launched a competitor, but they would most certainly require you to use an MSN account, thus adding friction to adoption.
a_c 5y ago
There was an article about when do startup brings in their first "product manager". Before bringing in "product people", the founders are the product people. I see it as the inflection point when the founder start delegating the product making to others. This is when the organization started scaling. Doing one thing good is a thing in the past. Venture capital has pushed basically all start-ups into 100-feature shops
def_true_false 5y ago
That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any way simpler then having regular account registration, unless you just completely ignore security. WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop app. The web frontend is still crap. Outsourcing account registration to mobile phone companies is ridiculous (same as Signal) -- in most of the world, it makes it pretty much impossible to preserve your privacy while using WA. Endless nagging about plain text cloud backups makes WA E2E encryption completely worthless, since even if you opt-out, 99% of your contacts will have them enabled. The impressive part, considering the size of their team, was their backend stuff and scale. Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC. (Their Android app was laughably bad for the longest time as well.)
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC I think they displaced Skype, mumble and teamspeak too.
  - rexreed 5y ago
    Discord displaced Slack in our organization and we're never looking back at Slack ever again.
  - def_true_false 5y ago
    In my experience it displaced Mumble and Teamspeak only for casual gaming. If your group is strict enough about muting/kicking people who refuse to fix their mic settings, Mumble or Teamspeak is generally better -- better quality, local volume adjustments, less resource hungry, open mic not being the default, etc. Think tryhard esport players, or just people with old hardware (probably 90% of CSGO players )).
    - Zababa 5y ago
numair 5y ago
It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal, that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do, and that’s really all that they did. I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.
- math-dev 5y ago
  Nice story. What are you doing now?
  - numair 5y ago
    Post-FAANG digital infrastructure. This is that moment, when the cycle starts all over again.
    - dleslie 5y ago
      Anything of note we humble readers should take a look at?
      - numair 5y ago
        I’m having one of those “why can’t there be 36 hours in a day” moments in life, but I’ve got to publish more about this very soon, so, it’s on the way. When you combine the story of WhatsApp’s small team / high impact development with the remote work shift of the past few years, it seems that the next cycle (regardless of when/what it is) will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California. It’s interesting to think of how that’ll affect the psychology of the area.
        5y ago
ryandrake 5y ago
I've always called this Feature Cram, and it's standard procedure at basically every company I've ever worked, small and large, B2B or B2C. Nobody is willing to say "Our software is a success and it's done. Let's fix the major bugs, put it into maintenance mode and start a new, separate, great idea!" Nope, instead it's always "OK the MVP is going well. Let's jam ten other unrelated things into it and see what takes off and what are the dogs (and be stuck with the dog features as technical debt forever). Then, when none of them reach the success of the original actually solid idea, they hire moar people and jam 40 more feature ideas in. Eventually, the original great thing that brought the company success is so hard to find and use because of the weight of the other crap, that a new upstart that Just Does One Thing Well comes in and eats their lunch. Then, at that new upstart, someone asks "What else can we bolt on to this thing to make it really grow??"
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  This may very well be unpopular, but this is what happens when you pay someone in measures tied directly to share price, or even more directly in shares; they have every incentive to do whatever it takes to juice the share price up. VC money has even more extreme growth expectations.
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    There's absolutely no good reason why the same team can't just make another great focused product under the same company umbrella instead of ruining the original
- Closi 5y ago
  Yes, although there is a balance - lest we forget that you couldn’t use WhatsApp on your computer unless your phone was turned on until a month ago, and there is still no iPad app. I think WhatsApp is in the place where it is so ubiquitous in some social circles that it faces less competitive pressures than other apps and can afford some of these pretty large gaps.
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  > Our software is a success and it's done Because no such state exists. Imagine if Photoshop stopped with updates twenty years ago, or even five.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
So is SpaceX a low quality idea? Some problems are just not feasibly solved by a handful of people. Does that make them low quality ideas?
wpietri 5y ago
This is a great point, but I'd add that the problem isn't experimentation. Neither is it having a lot of ideas. It's that they aren't using good experiments to kill off most of the ideas. I think of it in terms of divergence and convergence. Divergent thinking is great. If you think of an army on the march, leaders will be thinking about possible paths and sending out scouts. But when the scouts (experiments) come back with reports (results) they don't just send some soldiers along every path that looks promising. They winnow the options down, converging their thinking. Bad leaders don't have the discipline for that. And I think a lot of them pick up that habit from sales and/or seeking investment. "What will it do? What won't it do!" That's great for manipulating the feelings of the person you're currently talking to so they'll sign the deal. But it's terrible for running an effective, focused product development organization. I know I've seen companies die like that. And it's probably way more than we know, because as WhatsApp demonstrates, focusing hard on what's working is a great way to succeed well enough that people study and talk about you later.
toast0 5y ago
> They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step This is the key mistake. Having teams of 2-3 with a manager each is way too many managers. If you have a clear focus, small teams are great because they can work autonomously, with little management and good results. You can't hire your way out of coordination hell. I was at WhatsApp between 2011 and 2019; for the most part early on, we had essentially the CEO who does a mix of product management and engineering management and engineering, an actively engineering server manager (who also did some client work), and a client engineering manager. Android team grew enough to have an engineering manager and we also ended up with one product manager. Post aquisition, staff grew and so did management.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Post acquisition WhatsApp had to start making money. For all the doom and gloom Facebook is still too scared of putting ads in there.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    At least they can use it to harvest people’s networks and interests. Even more efficiently than Facebook itself.
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    Not letting a Facebook competitor get ahold of it has value in itself.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
> Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. Part 1: By definition: more engineers = more ideas. Part 2: Not so much. On the one hand, mediocre engineers are sometimes sequestered into small teams where they can't interfere with the important projects that all the smart people and other resources are being thrown at. They just sit there and churn out crappy ideas and crappy non-vital tools. Like daily indicators. On the other hand, I can see that as more of a tautology: ideas come from one person and are grown by a team. So be definition a quality idea comes from one person, and turns into a team.
tomc1985 5y ago
I really don't like working for those 100 darts people. They are a royal pain in the ass. Much better are the folks with a solid vision who can drive folks to execute on it, successfully.
ksec 5y ago
>WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. I wrote something similar [1] about its success not long ago on HN, >WhatApp grew because it was the only IM that worked on Smartphone. Thanks to Erlang. Yes. ICQ didn't bother. Microsoft refuse to accept Smartphone is the future of computing hence there never was MSN on Smartphone. Other contender tried but none of them managed to Scale. I still remember all my colleagues and friends used to download instant messenger on our phone to test them out, creating a group and basically DDoS each other until the system or network crash. No IM was able to handle the traffic load, not only WhatsApp did it many times better than their competitors, they also had almost all platform support, from Symbian to Blackberry. There is another part of the story that dont get much appreciation, is how they managed 2 million connection per box on a what is now a relatively slow server. The latest M1 Max would have been a lot faster. I often wonder if they could have pushed to 10 Million connection per box with same latency under current CPU and Memory. ( Not saying it is a good idea. ) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984924
papito 5y ago
They also famously had no meetings, like at all.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Like, 5 engineers never huddled together to figure out how to solve a problem?
  - vb6sp6 5y ago
    Getting together with your peers to discuss a problem is entirely different than being called into a meeting with someone who can only use a iPad to evaluate progress on things they cant understand while several other people sit idle waiting for their turn.
  - papito 5y ago
    There is no need to turn this into an argument by suggesting that somehow WhatsApp banned its engineers from getting together. That never happens, ever. We are obviously discussing scheduled meetings and scrums. By the way, this is mentioned here: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
pards 5y ago
> What happens when you have a restricted pool of people, but insist on doing 100s of things? Some leaders simply treat this as an "org structure" problem, not a problem of focus. They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step 1,000 times this.
HeavyStorm 5y ago
you're perfectly right I get scared every time that senior leadership pushes a new member on the team, because I know that overall quality will drop; their view is completely related to how much things they want to done on every cycle, and they don't care about quality (until it blows up in their face)
didibus 5y ago
I think there is something else that I find hard to explain, but it stems from the same vein. The best way I can call it is the impedence mismatch between what business people imagine and envision, and what the real products, their code, their systems are actually doing and are actually designed to do. It creates a kind of cost explosion in the velocity needed and it is often solved by throwing more developers at it instead of rethinking the actual design of the products so that they can better grow to support additional use cases and scale. You can't totally call it a hack, but it kind of is. A system was designed in a way that doesn't scale to the user demand and to the additional features or the new abstractions that it wants to grow into. Instead of rethinking holistically about how that system should be re-designed to now encompass all of this new stuff, and then put the work into changing it from its current model to that new one. What people do is they break up the current system in two, so now you have two service where you had one before. And now they hire a new team of engineers, manager, PM, etc. to start working on this new half. This repeats again where each of those two half are split in half again, hiring a new team, now there are four teams and four service, etc. As that happens, you can no longer redesign the way the systems fundamentally work, so each team accrues more and more complicated workarounds on their individual pieces and all new feature becomes cross team projects where you now need someone to coordinate the work between all teams for each little project. Once you start down this path, there is no way out, the only solution becomes throwing even more teams at it, breaking things down again and again into smaller pieces with a whole team behind it as each piece becomes more and more complex to all work around the inherent holistic limitations that were never reconsidered. It's a vicious cycle, the piece cannot grow in it's current state because it is too complex, break it up, have two teams tackle each half, now they can take the complexity until they themselves add more stuff to it which makes them too complex once more, break it again, add another team, rinse and repeat. The issue is often that complexity is accidental, due to the design in place and the tech dept accrued till now, as opposed to being inherent to the domain problem. But instead of addressing the accidental complexity, it is simply broken down in two so we can throw more people behind taming it.
demarq 5y ago
this
bennysomething 5y ago
And then I look at Dropbox and wonder why they ve made the product into a bloated mess that can't get some basic things right.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Correct

jeltz 5y ago

As an end user I think WhatsApp is a terrible product for some the reasons you mentioned (tied to phone number, no desktop client) but I cannot deny that it was the smart thing to do from a business perspective.

chpmrc 5y ago

> no hundreds of stupid features that product people stuff down in the name of experimentation. Amen to that!

tinus_hn 5y ago

Ultimately though WhatsApp ended up with a billion users and 0 revenue.

hermanradtke 5y ago
They charged $1 per year before Facebook removed the fee.
rglullis 5y ago
Not true. They were charging $1/year from users in the richer markets. They could easily reach hundreds of millions per year in revenue if they followed this model.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  ~$30M revenue in 2014 from 600M users. The vast majority of people will leave your service if it goes from $0 to even $1. So no, I don't think they could "easily" scale that up.
  - vladoski 5y ago
    Yes, but when I was younger, everyone that I knew, even digital illiterate people, paid that fee. Why? Because WhatsApp was (and is) everywhere.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    It didn't go from $0 to $1. It was always "$0 to most, $1 for those that really didn't care about paying because they knew that anything else would have much higher real costs" Hell, If WhatsApp ever got to say "Facebook wants to buy us, but we are also considering changing to a pay-what-you-want model to avoid selling out", I'd easily give them $10/year without batting an eye.
bryans 5y ago
Except for that $19 billion exit. Companies don't need to be turning a profit anymore -- they just need to prove they can scale, and someone else will figure out how to monetize it after a buyout. Hell, you don't even need to be a startup aiming for a buyout anymore to get away with being financially incompetent. Reddit is about to file their IPO at a valuation of $10 billion, even though they've been losing money for nearly two decades and are noticeably (and unsuccessfully) scrambling to find any presentable evidence that they're not complete buffoons.

ryanSrich 5y ago

This is why, after being both an engineer and a product manager (and VP of Product), and now a CTO of a seed stage startup, I’m fairly convinced PdMs are unnecessary. At least for the the type of company I’d like to build (WhatsApp as a primary example of that). Off loading the founders vision to someone else is a failure of both communication and org structure (at the seed-SB stage). People may not think hiring their first PdM is offloading their vision, but it is. That person is going to come up with their own ideas, validate their own assumptions, and push for product updates that directly serve their own self interests. To think that this won’t happen is naive. What I’ve found works the best is hiring competent engineers, giving them adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out.

nickthemagicman 5y ago
>> adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out. I wish more PM's thought like you.
- toomanyrichies 5y ago
  Ditto. As an engineer, it feels like product managers often feel a need to keep cranking out new features as a way to justify their seat at the table. I would love to work in an engineering culture which found a way around that problem. If that means the job falls on me instead, so be it.
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    They had me at adequate design spec.
  - ryanSrich 5y ago
    > If that means the job falls on me instead, so be it. Precisely this. I don’t know when “engineer” turned into “order taker”. There’s no reason to have a Product Manager define and engineers work. Good engineers are more than capable of defining their own work.

austincheney 5y ago

This confuses the mistakes of a mature company. Different dynamics. For example Google had thousands of engineers back when they had only 3 products: search, auction, and AdWords. I remember Travelocity having over a thousand developers and not being able to redesign a webpage. Its deeper than a product problem. Its an execution problem. It’s the ability to do what works with great criticality opposed to what’s expected, standard, normal, or comforting.

that_guy_iain 5y ago

WhatsApp was originally a super simple product. Send and receive messages. It was fundamentally a solved problem. It was all about the fact you could send free messages in a world where sms cost 10 cents a message. It wasn't that their messages were faster, their messages were anything other than free. They had a year fee of $1. Which I never paid yet I used their service anyways. The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot.

daanlo 5y ago
In my recollection it wasn‘t about saving 10 cents in the beginning, but about saving 1-2$ per message, since one of the first use cases it enabled was free international texting. That was a HUGE benefit. All the first evangelists I knew were in long distance relationships ;)
Jensson 5y ago
> The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot. Tell that to Twitter. Whatsapp staying at 50 instead of growing to 5000 is impressive.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  Different product. One is a social media network and one is a messaging app.
  - relaxing 5y ago
    You say that now, but Twitter also began as a way to send a quick message to your friends.
    - recursive 5y ago
      You used to be able to use it as a way to create a free self-managing SMS distribution list. Pretty cool, before I had phone with data capabilities. That was even a use case I understood. Now I feel too old to understand how to use twitter. But that can't be it. Much older people seem to have no problem.

ehPReth 5y ago

no iPad app either :/

anshumankmr 5y ago
The WABetaInfo account on Twitter said one is finally coming. And I think it seems likely considering we don't need the phone to be on while using Whatsapp Web.

amelius 5y ago

Uh yeah, but it was only possible to have such a simple product because they reached mass adoption. Without network effects, you've got to differentiate and thus add complexity to gain users.

Spivak 5y ago
But then how did they reach mass adoption in the first place? It’s not like they were a Swiss Army knife and before and stripped features once they got big.
- amelius 5y ago
  That's a totally different question. A larger company such as Microsoft could have easily grabbed the market first, but they didn't.
  - abduhl 5y ago
    This comment flies in the face of actual history. While your point about Microsoft may be right (who knows with how they’ve ruined their messaging platforms?) it certainly doesn’t hold true for iMessage which came out in roughly the same timeframe as WhatsApp (2011 vs 2009).
    - saghm 5y ago
      iMessage still has yet to come to other platforms, and at least for a few years after the iPhone's launch, many people viewed it as a luxury product and were unlikely to spend the money to get one compared to cheaper phones (which WhatsApp supported).
- et-al 5y ago
  They had fantastic product-market fit. As dleslie and that_guy_iain have mentioned, it was expensive to send an SMS text back then, especially in Europe when your friends have different country codes. So WhatsApp was a free alternative that tapped the unmet need for millions. And signing up with only a phone number seems like a nobrainer nowadays, but the mindset of the time was still email + password. Sure, Microsoft could have launched a competitor, but they would most certainly require you to use an MSN account, thus adding friction to adoption.

a_c 5y ago

There was an article about when do startup brings in their first "product manager". Before bringing in "product people", the founders are the product people. I see it as the inflection point when the founder start delegating the product making to others. This is when the organization started scaling. Doing one thing good is a thing in the past. Venture capital has pushed basically all start-ups into 100-feature shops

def_true_false 5y ago

That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any way simpler then having regular account registration, unless you just completely ignore security. WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop app. The web frontend is still crap. Outsourcing account registration to mobile phone companies is ridiculous (same as Signal) -- in most of the world, it makes it pretty much impossible to preserve your privacy while using WA. Endless nagging about plain text cloud backups makes WA E2E encryption completely worthless, since even if you opt-out, 99% of your contacts will have them enabled. The impressive part, considering the size of their team, was their backend stuff and scale. Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC. (Their Android app was laughably bad for the longest time as well.)

Zababa 5y ago
> Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC I think they displaced Skype, mumble and teamspeak too.
- rexreed 5y ago
  Discord displaced Slack in our organization and we're never looking back at Slack ever again.
- def_true_false 5y ago
  In my experience it displaced Mumble and Teamspeak only for casual gaming. If your group is strict enough about muting/kicking people who refuse to fix their mic settings, Mumble or Teamspeak is generally better -- better quality, local volume adjustments, less resource hungry, open mic not being the default, etc. Think tryhard esport players, or just people with old hardware (probably 90% of CSGO players )).
  - Zababa 5y ago

numair 5y ago

It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal, that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do, and that’s really all that they did. I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.

math-dev 5y ago
Nice story. What are you doing now?
- numair 5y ago
  Post-FAANG digital infrastructure. This is that moment, when the cycle starts all over again.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    Anything of note we humble readers should take a look at?
    - numair 5y ago
      I’m having one of those “why can’t there be 36 hours in a day” moments in life, but I’ve got to publish more about this very soon, so, it’s on the way. When you combine the story of WhatsApp’s small team / high impact development with the remote work shift of the past few years, it seems that the next cycle (regardless of when/what it is) will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California. It’s interesting to think of how that’ll affect the psychology of the area.
      - 5y ago

ryandrake 5y ago

I've always called this Feature Cram, and it's standard procedure at basically every company I've ever worked, small and large, B2B or B2C. Nobody is willing to say "Our software is a success and it's done. Let's fix the major bugs, put it into maintenance mode and start a new, separate, great idea!" Nope, instead it's always "OK the MVP is going well. Let's jam ten other unrelated things into it and see what takes off and what are the dogs (and be stuck with the dog features as technical debt forever). Then, when none of them reach the success of the original actually solid idea, they hire moar people and jam 40 more feature ideas in. Eventually, the original great thing that brought the company success is so hard to find and use because of the weight of the other crap, that a new upstart that Just Does One Thing Well comes in and eats their lunch. Then, at that new upstart, someone asks "What else can we bolt on to this thing to make it really grow??"

bobthepanda 5y ago
This may very well be unpopular, but this is what happens when you pay someone in measures tied directly to share price, or even more directly in shares; they have every incentive to do whatever it takes to juice the share price up. VC money has even more extreme growth expectations.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  There's absolutely no good reason why the same team can't just make another great focused product under the same company umbrella instead of ruining the original
Closi 5y ago
Yes, although there is a balance - lest we forget that you couldn’t use WhatsApp on your computer unless your phone was turned on until a month ago, and there is still no iPad app. I think WhatsApp is in the place where it is so ubiquitous in some social circles that it faces less competitive pressures than other apps and can afford some of these pretty large gaps.
tomnipotent 5y ago
> Our software is a success and it's done Because no such state exists. Imagine if Photoshop stopped with updates twenty years ago, or even five.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

So is SpaceX a low quality idea? Some problems are just not feasibly solved by a handful of people. Does that make them low quality ideas?

wpietri 5y ago

This is a great point, but I'd add that the problem isn't experimentation. Neither is it having a lot of ideas. It's that they aren't using good experiments to kill off most of the ideas. I think of it in terms of divergence and convergence. Divergent thinking is great. If you think of an army on the march, leaders will be thinking about possible paths and sending out scouts. But when the scouts (experiments) come back with reports (results) they don't just send some soldiers along every path that looks promising. They winnow the options down, converging their thinking. Bad leaders don't have the discipline for that. And I think a lot of them pick up that habit from sales and/or seeking investment. "What will it do? What won't it do!" That's great for manipulating the feelings of the person you're currently talking to so they'll sign the deal. But it's terrible for running an effective, focused product development organization. I know I've seen companies die like that. And it's probably way more than we know, because as WhatsApp demonstrates, focusing hard on what's working is a great way to succeed well enough that people study and talk about you later.

toast0 5y ago

> They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step This is the key mistake. Having teams of 2-3 with a manager each is way too many managers. If you have a clear focus, small teams are great because they can work autonomously, with little management and good results. You can't hire your way out of coordination hell. I was at WhatsApp between 2011 and 2019; for the most part early on, we had essentially the CEO who does a mix of product management and engineering management and engineering, an actively engineering server manager (who also did some client work), and a client engineering manager. Android team grew enough to have an engineering manager and we also ended up with one product manager. Post aquisition, staff grew and so did management.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Post acquisition WhatsApp had to start making money. For all the doom and gloom Facebook is still too scared of putting ads in there.
- laurent92 5y ago
  At least they can use it to harvest people’s networks and interests. Even more efficiently than Facebook itself.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Not letting a Facebook competitor get ahold of it has value in itself.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

> Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. Part 1: By definition: more engineers = more ideas. Part 2: Not so much. On the one hand, mediocre engineers are sometimes sequestered into small teams where they can't interfere with the important projects that all the smart people and other resources are being thrown at. They just sit there and churn out crappy ideas and crappy non-vital tools. Like daily indicators. On the other hand, I can see that as more of a tautology: ideas come from one person and are grown by a team. So be definition a quality idea comes from one person, and turns into a team.

tomc1985 5y ago

I really don't like working for those 100 darts people. They are a royal pain in the ass. Much better are the folks with a solid vision who can drive folks to execute on it, successfully.

ksec 5y ago

>WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. I wrote something similar [1] about its success not long ago on HN, >WhatApp grew because it was the only IM that worked on Smartphone. Thanks to Erlang. Yes. ICQ didn't bother. Microsoft refuse to accept Smartphone is the future of computing hence there never was MSN on Smartphone. Other contender tried but none of them managed to Scale. I still remember all my colleagues and friends used to download instant messenger on our phone to test them out, creating a group and basically DDoS each other until the system or network crash. No IM was able to handle the traffic load, not only WhatsApp did it many times better than their competitors, they also had almost all platform support, from Symbian to Blackberry. There is another part of the story that dont get much appreciation, is how they managed 2 million connection per box on a what is now a relatively slow server. The latest M1 Max would have been a lot faster. I often wonder if they could have pushed to 10 Million connection per box with same latency under current CPU and Memory. ( Not saying it is a good idea. ) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984924

papito 5y ago

They also famously had no meetings, like at all.

Scoundreller 5y ago
Like, 5 engineers never huddled together to figure out how to solve a problem?
- vb6sp6 5y ago
  Getting together with your peers to discuss a problem is entirely different than being called into a meeting with someone who can only use a iPad to evaluate progress on things they cant understand while several other people sit idle waiting for their turn.
- papito 5y ago
  There is no need to turn this into an argument by suggesting that somehow WhatsApp banned its engineers from getting together. That never happens, ever. We are obviously discussing scheduled meetings and scrums. By the way, this is mentioned here: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

pards 5y ago

> What happens when you have a restricted pool of people, but insist on doing 100s of things? Some leaders simply treat this as an "org structure" problem, not a problem of focus. They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step 1,000 times this.

HeavyStorm 5y ago

you're perfectly right I get scared every time that senior leadership pushes a new member on the team, because I know that overall quality will drop; their view is completely related to how much things they want to done on every cycle, and they don't care about quality (until it blows up in their face)

didibus 5y ago

I think there is something else that I find hard to explain, but it stems from the same vein. The best way I can call it is the impedence mismatch between what business people imagine and envision, and what the real products, their code, their systems are actually doing and are actually designed to do. It creates a kind of cost explosion in the velocity needed and it is often solved by throwing more developers at it instead of rethinking the actual design of the products so that they can better grow to support additional use cases and scale. You can't totally call it a hack, but it kind of is. A system was designed in a way that doesn't scale to the user demand and to the additional features or the new abstractions that it wants to grow into. Instead of rethinking holistically about how that system should be re-designed to now encompass all of this new stuff, and then put the work into changing it from its current model to that new one. What people do is they break up the current system in two, so now you have two service where you had one before. And now they hire a new team of engineers, manager, PM, etc. to start working on this new half. This repeats again where each of those two half are split in half again, hiring a new team, now there are four teams and four service, etc. As that happens, you can no longer redesign the way the systems fundamentally work, so each team accrues more and more complicated workarounds on their individual pieces and all new feature becomes cross team projects where you now need someone to coordinate the work between all teams for each little project. Once you start down this path, there is no way out, the only solution becomes throwing even more teams at it, breaking things down again and again into smaller pieces with a whole team behind it as each piece becomes more and more complex to all work around the inherent holistic limitations that were never reconsidered. It's a vicious cycle, the piece cannot grow in it's current state because it is too complex, break it up, have two teams tackle each half, now they can take the complexity until they themselves add more stuff to it which makes them too complex once more, break it again, add another team, rinse and repeat. The issue is often that complexity is accidental, due to the design in place and the tech dept accrued till now, as opposed to being inherent to the domain problem. But instead of addressing the accidental complexity, it is simply broken down in two so we can throw more people behind taming it.

demarq 5y ago

this

bennysomething 5y ago

And then I look at Dropbox and wonder why they ve made the product into a bloated mess that can't get some basic things right.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Correct