Today, WhatsApp has become the most popular messaging app in the world, They have more than 2 billion monthly active users. meaning that 25% of the population of the world uses this one app. But have you ever wondered, since this app is completely free to use, and there are no ads on this app, so how does this company WhatsApp earn money?
DEVELOPMENT OF WHATSAPP:
come let’s understand the Business Model of WhatsApp. by two people: Brian Acton and Jan Koum. Before this, the two had worked together at Yahoo! for 9 years. When they left Yahoo! they applied for jobs at various companies, they applied to Facebook but were rejected.
They applied to Twitter but were rejected from there as well. In fact, in 2009, Brian Acton famously tweeted, in it, he had written that he had applied for a job at Twitter, but he was rejected, but he wasn’t too disappointed because the commute would’ve been too long.
He tweeted something similar after being rejected from Facebook. Ironically, just 5 years after this, Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion. But before this, it is interesting to know where did they got the idea of creating WhatsApp.
Jan Koum used to frequent gyms, and there he realized that he wouldn’t be able to receive the calls of his friends. He kept on missing calls. That made him think that there should be an app, that would show a status that he was in the gym at the moment so that his friends could see the status and understand that since he’s in the gym, they shouldn’t call him then.
On this basic idea, he created the app WhatsApp. It’s interesting to note that this app didn’t have messaging. You couldn’t send messages to anyone. You can do so now on WhatsApp. This app was simply WhatsApp.
The word WhatsApp came from the words ‘What’s up?’ Like you ask people, “What’s up? How are you doing?” On this app, you could simply let others know what you were up to. Meaning that you could simply post your status on this app.
You could write that you were in the gym. and the app would notify the rest of your friends, that you’re in the gym. when you change your status, this app notifies your friends and contacts.
This app was created for doing merely this, initially. But eventually, he realized that some of the users of this app were using the status as messages. When one would change the status to doing something, their friends might update their status with whatever they were doing. So the first person would update their status yet again, in response.
Similarly, people started using these as messages. Then they thought that it would be better to make the app a messaging service. and this idea was a huge success.
Because back in 2009, there was only one other app on which one could message others for free. That was the BlackBerry’s BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).
The problem with it was that you had to have a BlackBerry phone. So only the users of BlackBerry phones could use BBM. and WhatsApp filled in a gap here.
The users of other phones felt the need for a free messaging app, and WhatsApp became that app. Within days, it was downloaded over 200,000 times.
RISE OF WHATSAPP:
WhatsApp started receiving funding from investors. WhatsApp’s popularity skyrocketed on its own. Without any marketing or ads. Because users liked it so much that they told their friends about it.
Those friends told their friends, and WhatsApp saw organic growth. As you’d remember, around 2009, these telephone companies used to charge a lot of money for sending each SMS.
Calling rates were based on minutes per call. They were quite expensive. and here was a clear-cut free option so people started using WhatsApp.
Within the next 2 years, this app became one of the top 10 apps in the AppStore. This was true for almost every country. Except for America. in America, in 2009, most of their telephone companies had flat rates for SMSs and free calling minutes.
So this wasn’t a great incentive for the Americans to use WhatsApp. They continued with using SMSs. and even today, the USA is one of the worst-performing markets for WhatsApp.
Can you imagine it? WhatsApp saw its growth due to European, Asian, and African countries.
Talking about money, initially, there weren’t many expenses to run WhatsApp. They had a small team,
they had built a simple app. They weren’t spending money on marketing or running ads. So the biggest expense of running WhatsApp was the cost of sending SMSs. The verification text that WhatsApp sends when a user joins it, so the one SMS per user they had to send for verification, was their biggest expense at the time.
Where could they get money for this? They had received some investments. With their success, more companies wanted to invest in them. They would give them money in exchange for their shares. But the investments weren’t exactly pouring.
So they came up with a new business model.
WhatsApp started charging its users $0.99 about $1 per year, they started charging their users to use this app. You heard it right, WhatsApp wasn’t a free app anymore.
They started charging $1. But despite that, the user experience of their app was so good, and the app worked so smoothly, on top of it, new features were being added, like you could now send photos over WhatsApp.
Their growth continued. By 2011, their app had become the top app in the AppStore. Brain Acton was clear about one thing. He had stuck a note on his table.
“No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!“
He didn’t want to run any ads on WhatsApp. Nor did he want to add features that had no greater purpose. He wanted to keep the app simple and to the point. The app built for messaging. He wanted the app to be so good at that one thing that no other app could compete with it. and people keep on using it.
Their $1 Business Model was very successful. Within 3 years, WhatsApp became a profitable company. All the money they earned was spent on their small team. So that new features could be added to WhatsApp. The problems in the software could be rectified. and a reliable messaging app could be created. They claimed that their product was their passion. and that the users’ data wasn’t something that interested them.
New Business Model:
What was the Business Model that Mark Zuckerberg cooked up? In 2018, Facebook launched the WhatsApp Business app. On this app, businesses can create their business profiles. and the verified businesses can link their websites and Facebook pages, with this business profile.
Facebook established a link between Facebook Pages and WhatsApp. People can use the business profiles to go on Facebook through the link. They created an excellent option for promoting Facebook. The new users to visit the business profiles can now go to the Facebook Page with a click only.
Although the WhatsApp Business application is completely free to use, the Business API is the source of revenue for WhatsApp. API is the Application Programming Interface.
A medium through which multiple applications can communicate with each other. Or perform a function or a task.
Let me explain this with an example.
When you book a taxi on Uber, you would’ve noticed that the map on Uber, has the watermark of Google. Google Maps is providing its services to Uber. so that Uber can show a map on its app.
Google is not the creator of Uber. instead, what’s happening here is that Google Maps is providing its API to Uber. It’s providing its Application Programming Interface to Uber.
Similarly, WhatsApp is selling its API to businesses. If businesses want to interact with customers over WhatsApp, and to automatically respond to queries, they can do so, But if they use WhatsApp’s API, they can even send shipping confirmation, and appointment reminders and even sell event tickets to their customers.
THE REVENUE MODEL:
The revenue model is that if the businesses reply within 24 hours, sending the message is free for them. But if they need to reply after 24 hours, they have to pay a small fee then. The fees are calculated differently for different countries.
In India, it is €0.0038 for the first 250,000 messages. It is around ₹0.30. You might ask about the businesses that choose to use these services.
Friends, the answer to it is the companies that deal with millions of customers. Like airline tickets, or travel tickets movie tickets, or large banks. So the users of WhatsApp Business API are huge companies. Like:
Singapore Airlines, Booking.com, Uber, MakeMyTrip, Netflix etc these are some of the examples of the users.