post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Customer

How behavioral economics can improve product strategy

Product Roadmap

Why most product roadmaps fail: Phil Hornby (Product Leadership Coach) – ProductTank Porto

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Join us at #mtpcon London in 2025 – mark your calendars

Connecting fans to creators at Spotify (Dariusz Dziuk, Product Lead, Spotify)

Why teams often struggle with OKRs: A conversation with Jeff Gothelf

Deep dive: Crafting your product vision and mission

5 ways to invent and simplify as an AI/ML product manager

Martin Eriksson has 25+ years experience building world-class online products in both corporate and start-up environments for global brands such as Monster, Financial Times, Huddle, and Covestor. He is the Founder of ProductTank, the Co-Founder and Curator of Mind the Product, and a Product Partner at leading venture capital fund EQT Ventures. He is also the author of the best-seller <em>Product Leadership, How Top Product Leaders Launch Great Products and Build Successful Teams</em> (O'Reilly, 2017).

Martin Eriksson

<p><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/whatsapp.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/whatsapp-300x232.jpg" alt="whatsapp" width="300" height="232" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4455" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/whatsapp-300x232.jpg 300w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/whatsapp.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>With today&#8217;s news that Facebook has acquired group messaging app <a href="http://www.whatsapp.com/" title="WhatsApp">WhatsApp</a> for <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/facebook-buying-whatsapp-for-16b-in-cash-and-stock-plus-3b-in-rsus/" title="Facebook Buying WhatsApp For $16B In Cash And Stock And $3B In RSUs, Will Keep The Messaging Service Independent">over $16 billion</a> one of the quietest companies in Silicon Valley has proven the value of extreme product focus, and upset a few cardinal rules along the way.</p>
<h3>Product Focus</h3>
<p>WhatsApp is a tiny startup, with only around 50 employees, yet has managed to take their simple, basic messaging product to huge scale. It has over 450 million monthly active users, 72% of whom are active every day. Staggeringly, their messaging volume rivals the global SMS volume &#8211; estimated at 7 trillion messages per year. And with over 1 million new users per day they&#8217;re still growing like mad.</p>
<blockquote><p>“WhatsApp’s extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.” Jan Koum, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO</p></blockquote>
<p>Unlike most start-ups, this incredible growth has been achieved without any marketing &#8211; they have spent exactly $0 on user acquisition and don&#8217;t have a PR or marketer on staff or even a sign outside their office. 35 of their employees are engineers and the rest are in customer support.</p>
<p>This makes WhatsApp perhaps the clearest example of the success of single-minded product focus. From day one they have focused on making the best messaging app and every feature and improvement that has followed has been in service of that goal. When they introduced voice messaging in 2013 it was a simple extension of the existing messaging tools, with a supremely simple one-click implementation that bested the combined efforts of google, facebook and twitter.</p>
<blockquote><p>“The number of taps matters. People want to send a message and be on their way.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<h3>Free isn&#8217;t always good</h3>
<p>WhatsApp has managed to achieve their staggering growth in part because they&#8217;ve eschewed the traditional free or freemium model in mobile apps. Their app is free to download, and costs just 99 cents per user after the first year. This has meant that they&#8217;ve been able to avoid monetising their app through advertising &#8211; something that would have detracted from the user experience of the product.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Utilities get out of the way. Can you imagine if you flipped a light switch and had to watch an ad before you got electricity? Can you imagine if you turned on a faucet and had to watch an ad before the water came out?” Jan Koum, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO</p></blockquote>
<h3>What does the future hold?</h3>
<p>It will be really interesting to see how this integrates into the Facebook ecosystem over time &#8211; will it replace messages and their dedicated messaging app? Will it serve as a bulwark against other chat apps like Snapchat to ensure that teens who grow up on chat apps move their social graph onto Facebook itself once <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/reports-facebooks-death-greatly-exaggerated/" title="The reports of Facebook’s death have been greatly exaggerated">their social networking use changes</a>?</p>
<p>Either way Facebook just paid over $40 per user because they believe WhatsApp will continue to grow to a billion users or more &#8211; and that&#8217;s all thanks to that single-minded product focus.</p>
<p>Do one thing, and do it well.</p>

core/freeform

Product Marketing

Product Positioning by April Dunford

Using Data to Build a Brand, by Abba Newberry

Bringing Product and Marketing Teams Together By Kathryn Corrick and Frank Wales

How YouTube can be Used as a Servant to Your Product By Lei Shei

Using the 3 T’s to Curate a Customer First Culture by Shyna Zhang

Popular Misconceptions of the Product Craft by Sherif Mansour

The only product metric that matters by Josh Elman

Product Marketing at Stack Overflow – Alexa Scordato

Alex Osterwalder – Designing your Value Proposition

Video: Your product doesn’t sell itself

WhatsApp – The power of product focus

ProductTank Bangalore

ProductTank Mumbai

ProductTank Johannesburg

ProductTank Tauranga

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Vilnius

ProductTank Timisoara

ProductTank Stockholm

ProductTank München

ProductTank Düsseldorf

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Heidelberg

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Amsterdam

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank London

ProductTank Curitiba

ProductTank Brisbane

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Málaga

ProductTank Buenos Aires

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Braunschweig

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Dubai

ProductTank Vienna

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Bucharest

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Atlanta

ProductTank Brno

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Rotterdam

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Bangkok

ProductTank San Diego

ProductTank Hong Kong

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Exeter

ProductTank Manchester

WhatsApp – The power of product focus

Martin Eriksson

Read more

Comments