WhatsApp's Short History And Its Ten Years Of Excellence

It still feels like that WhatsApp was launched just a few years ago but a decade has passed literally. Do you know who named the app and when it was launched? WhatsApp was founded by two former employees of Yahoo, Brian Acton, and Jan Koum, who even applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected.

In 2009, the idea by Koum was discussed amongst three friends and found a Russian developer for this purpose. Koum named the app “WhatsApp” to make it sound like “What’s up” and on February 24th the app was available on the App Store.

If you aren’t aware, every App, in the beginning, is not perfect and with the passage of time when people and the App testers report issues, that moment is what makes people lose their interest in further updating the app. The same thing happened to Koum, and he felt like he should get a job somewhere, but Acton was there to encourage him by saying just wait a few more months. In 2009, when Apple launched a push notification feature, Koum updated his app and the version 2.0 got 250k users.

Did you know: The service was changed from “free” to “paid” for a while to avoid developing too fast?

In 2011, WhatsApp was in the top twenty apps of the App Store and Sequoia Capital a venture capital firm invested almost 8$ million for fifteen percent of the company. In Feb 2013, WhatsApp had more than 200 million users and fifty staff members this is where Sequoia invested another 50$ million which made the value of WhatsApp stand at $1.5 billion.

In 2014, the largest acquisition was made by Facebook in the history of the venture-backed company. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion, and people had to move to other Apps because the service became unavailable for some time. This was when other apps like Telegram and Line claimed to have noticed millions of downloads.