Samy Acosta
Founder/Co-Founders: Who founded the company? Are they still involved in day to day operations?
Jan Koum and Brian Acton are the Founders of this millionaire app but it messaging app was bought by Mark Zuckerberg the owner of Facebook.
How does the company advertise its product/services?
This company doesn’t advertise itself because the founders didn’t want it app to be just another ad clearinghouse. They wanted to build something that works and save people’s time.
Michael Yunatan
Office/Headquarters: Where is the company located? Do they have a single headquarters, or do they have locations throughout the country/world?
The company has their main headquarters in Mountain View, California. It is their corporate location where they hold all their conferences and meetings. Due to the company having a small amount of employees, they are not located throughout the world.
Investors: Who invested in the company when it was in its start up phase?
Of course, the 2 founders of the company, whose names are Jan Koum and Brian Acton were the first investors in the company prior to its birth in February of 2009. Koum relied on his $400,000 by working for Yahoo. In October, Acton persuaded five ex-Yahoo friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and as a result was granted co-founder status of the company. The founders, Koum and Acton agreed to take $7 million from Sequoia Capital on top of their $250,000 seed funding, after months of negotiation with Sequoia Headquarters.
Products/Services: What does the company offer its users/subscribers? Services, products, consumer goods?
As we all know, Whatsapp offers a variety of services that almost every Smartphone user can find useful and convenient. Aside from the basic instant messaging that it offers, Whatsapp offers the option of sending Voice calls, much like VoIP, over the Data network. Meaning that you do not need to be a subscribed with a cell carrier to send messages. As long as you have WiFi. Also, as of January 2015 the application launched a Web Client that lets computer browser users send messages as well (not only for smartphone users). Additionally, the application lets users sync with other WhatsApp users via your contact list to make your WhatsApp experience more enjoyable. Users can post statuses and share their own profile picture, much like facebook. The application also has a wide variety of emoticons, used for expressing different emotions, ideas, and to add charisma to the conversation.
Works Cited- http://www.whatsapp.com/contact/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
Shehryar V
Method of Making Money: How does your company make money? Through advertising, subscribers, royalties, affiliate purchases, lead generation, selling data, or freemium payment models? Describe in detail.
WhatsApp makes money through both subscriptions and selling user data. The first year is free but afterwards there is a charge of $1.00 per year for its users. Whatsapp sells user data to third party companies or uses it for itself. It also gets paid by the appstore and google play based upon how many downloads they have achieved.
Revenue: How much revenue did company earn in 2014? (Find the most recently available data. This might be difficult.)
The company doesn’t charge much of a subscription fee and subsequently does not generate much revenue. The estimated revenue for 2014 is 144 million dollars. It is noteworthy that whatsapp was acquired by facebook for 22 Billion dollars.
Target Customers: Who are the target customers for this company?
The target consumers are smartphone users and even some computer users.
Juan Lu
How many current users/customers, etc: How many customers do they currently have?
As of January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly active users, up from August 2014 when the company announced over 600 million MAU. The company’s growth in India is also pretty impressive at around 5 million. whatsapp is a company that is growing more and more everyday.
Competitors/Competitive Advantage: What companies offer services/products that compete with your chosen company? What sets your chosen company apart from its competitors?
Company :Hike
They offered text messaging, photos/videos sharing. 128 SSL encryption for security of messages.
What makes this company special is that they offered voice calling which are free calls in 2G, 3G and over WiFI. You also can share big file formats as .PDF . DOC . ZIP .AVI etc.
Works Cited:
http://get.hike.in/features.html
http://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly-active-whatsapp-users/
http://www.whatsapp.com/legal/#Privacy
http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-some-realistic-revenue-numbers-for-whatsapp-2014-2
