Article
Staying Focused in a Mass Market
November 21, 2025
Field Notes Chapter Two: WhatsApp
In early 2009, former Yahoo! coworkers Jan Koum and Brian Acton founded WhatsApp, an active phone book that displayed when contacts were available or busy. A few months later, Apple launched push notifications, enabling WhatsApp to immediately morph into a free, cross-platform messaging service.
While the product has remained brilliant in its simplicity, WhatsApp has added value through a multitude of features that has allowed the product to evolve into the world’s preeminent messaging platform. Naturally, their innovations didn’t come for free, but for a company of its size, WhatsApp raised only modest capital compared to its eventual valuation. In total, they had three funding rounds before being acquired: a Seed Round in 2009 for $250K, a Series A in 2011 for $8M, and a Series B in 2013 for $52M, with the final round valuing the company at roughly $1.5B before they were acquired by Facebook for $19B in 2014.
Their simple value proposition clearly resonated with users around the world. By 2010, WhatsApp had 10 million monthly active users, and by the time they were acquired by Facebook, they had 500 million . WhatsApp crossed the billion user threshold in 2016 and today might be the most used app in the world with over 3 billion users (well over a third of the world population) and almost a billion in India alone .
Their total addressable market is anyone with internet access, which doesn’t sound very focused. The graveyard of companies and products that tried to do too much or appeal to too many people is a big one. So how did WhatsApp, arguably the most mass market tech product in the world, find global success? I’ll leave it to the expert, Diana Flotten, to take us home.
Perspective from Diana Flotten, Senior Product Strategist:
The human need to communicate with each other is eternal, whether communication is verbal, written, or in other modes like pictures or music. Texting and video chats are just more recent evolutions of this universal desire to communicate in real time and asynchronously.
Though WhatsApp has a mass market, it succeeded by focusing on the universal desire of human communication while giving users a broad range of options to create a personalized experience.
Attempts to build a global brand are often met with failure (including oft-cited examples like Uber in China and Target’s expansion in Canada). Brands often fail to adequately understand differing customer needs and miss on cultural alignment. However, by serving a universal behavior, WhatsApp was able to build a globally-adopted brand that serves a breadth of users, from those who only need a basic texting service to those who want a more personalized, creative experience.
What’s better than free?
When WhatApp was launched in 2009, it solved many of the problems that texting apps alone couldn’t solve. In the US, many have grown accustomed to unlimited data and no international roaming charges, but that isn’t universal, especially when WhatsApp was founded. Many cell phone carrier plans had data, calling, and text limits (as well as international charges), and exceeding them resulted in unpredictable fees. While many carrier plans have become more generous, plans still vary. WhatsApp’s use of Wifi instead of data, making unlimited international calls and messages, as well as multimedia support, free for users, was a game changer.
Overcoming Technology and Geographic Limitations
WhatsApp also overcame the technology barriers of SMS texting that was the norm at the time. SMS allowed only short, character-based messages. Remember when a long text used to come in multiple messages? While text capabilities have greatly evolved since 2009, WhatsApp took what appealed to users about social media, such as the ability to send images, files, and videos, and adapted it to texting before traditional messaging technology had those capabilities.
WhatsApp’s OS-agnostic approach also enabled its global reach. iPhones dominate the US market with a 58% market share, but Android dominates the global market with a 72% market share . As an Android user in the iPhone-dominated US, I have long lamented the quirky, inconsistent, texting experience with iPhone users, especially for groups. While the experience has improved, most of my group chats have migrated to WhatsApp.
Just the way you want it
WhatsApp’s broad range of features gives users flexibility to customize their experience and consolidate communications to fewer apps:
- Media Formats: Whether it’s texts, voice or video calls, asynchronous audio or video messages, disappearing messages (a la Snapchat), or voice memo transcription, WhatsApp gives users the ability to send and receive messages how and when they want.
- Information Organization: WhatsApp has taken cues from digital experiences like Spotify by providing organizational features such as searching, grouping, filtering, favoriting, and pinning.
- Creative Expression: WhatApp provides opportunities to create custom avatars, stickers, AI-created profile pictures, music beds, and more to personalize the experience.
- Groups and Channels: WhatsApp gives many group management options, whether the group is ongoing or for specific events, including polls and invitation management. Similar to social media, WhatApp users can follow channels to surface content of interest.
In conclusion
As Diana shared, WhatsApp is far more complex today than they were in 2009, and they serve billions more users, yet they remain focused. By targeting the specific, but universal behavior of communicating through technology, WhatsApp has become irreplaceable.
If you liked this content, follow our product strategy field notes here and reach out to chat about how your product is resonating with your audience.
