years, this app became one of the top NUMBER_TOKEN apps in the AppStore. This was true for almost every country. Except for America. In America, in NUMBER_TOKEN, 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 actually 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 in. So they came up with a new business model. WhatsApp started charging its users $NUMBER_TOKEN about $NUMBER_TOKEN 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 $NUMBER_TOKEN. 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 NUMBER_TOKEN, their app had become the top app in the AppStore. 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 $NUMBER_TOKEN Business Model was very successful. Within NUMBER_TOKEN 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. That they had no interest in taking users' data. But after this, Facebook makes an entry in our story. And this Model started crumbling apart from here. Mark Zuckerberg was trying to buy WhatsApp since NUMBER_TOKEN. But this deal was finalised in February NUMBER_TOKEN. And WhatsApp is taken over for $NUMBER_TOKEN billion by Facebook. And the employees working in WhatsApp, now became Facebook employees. WhatsApp founders had a meeting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai as well. But no deal was finalised with Google. Friends, if you're feeling inspired by WhatsApp's story, and want to invest in the stocks of big US companies like WhatsApp, then I'd take a small ad break to let you know that an awesome way to do this is through Vested. Vested is a Zero-commission US investing platform. For Indian investors. Yup, you heard it right.
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN Friends, if you're feeling inspired by WhatsApp's story, and want to invest in the stocks of big US companies like WhatsApp, then I'd take a small ad break to let you know that an awesome way to do this is through Vested. Vested is a Zero-commission US investing platform. For Indian investors. Yup, you heard it right. END_SPONSOR_TOKEN