Whatsapp Case Study

1838 Words4 Pages

Ann Murrell
Dr. Rebecca Borah
English 1001-027
28 March 2014

Was WhatsApp a Wise Investment for Facebook?

Facebook invested $19 million on a text messaging service, WhatsApp. This stunned the tech world and many investors. WhatsApp was founded by two former Yahoo employees, Jan Koum and Brian Acton in 2009. It was built with merely a 55 persons staff and only 32 engineers - that’s one WhatsApp developer to every 14 million active users. This also means that Facebook paid $345 million per WhatsApp employee. In the past, with a majority of start up companies, the size of the staff behind its company serves as a function in the company’s impact. Many of these same investors say the key to a good entrepreneurial investment: is the entrepreneur’s that don’t want to sell for monetary value, those who aren’t in it for the money, are worth the money.

WhatsApp is a messaging application that allows you to share text, pictures and video anywhere at anytime for one dollar annually. One of WhatsApps more notable traits is that it is more popular outside of the United States it’s most popular in Europe, India, Latin American. However “Rabbis discourage the apps use among ultra-Orthodox Jews, saying that it’s responsible for divorces in the community” (Steele). It doesn’t charge you any additional fees for sending the messages while it works as modern mobile messaging software. Most monthly plans in the United States include unlimited text messaging, that doesn’t exist overseas where the carriers charge per message. While 310 million Americans share a single nation and a telephone network- the rest of the nation has to deal with international texting and calling. WhatsApp offers a price sensitive solution to these users international messa...

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