WhatsApp broke the startup playbook

WhatsApp went against so many startup rules.

They deliberately slowed down growth. For a while, they toggled a $1 charge on and off, not primarily to drive revenue, but to add friction and throttle signups. Their logic was that too much growth might turn their systems unstable and produce bad user experience.

While competitors hurried to add bells and whistles, in WhatsApp, most feature requests were denied and the features they actually built were tested internally and debugged for a long time, until they were polished and reliable. It took them 2 years to release video-calls, for instance.

They took little money from investors relative to their scale and avoided the fundraising treadmill. Before the acquisition, WhatsApp raised roughly $60 million, most of it in a late $52 million round, when the company was already operating at enormous scale.

They kept the team small. Even at 450 million monthly active users, they had around 30 engineers.

They avoided Scrum or any other discernible methodology. Because the team was small, they thought people could just talk to each other. They also avoided scheduled meetings or ceremonies. Not even formal PR reviews were enforced.

They had 8 native frontend apps, even for less popular mobile platforms. Instead of limiting themselves to the most popular, they tried to provide the best experience, to a “grandma in the countryside with an old phone and bad internet”. That required highly optimized native apps.

They used rented bare metal servers instead of cloud abstractions. Most of the work was handled by a small-ish amount of very powerful servers. This gave them a lot of capacity for less money.

They were obsessed with outages, more than any other metric, that’s why they used a less well-known technology for the backend: Erlang, instead of more popular choices such as Java or NodeJS. Erlang helped them keep evolving the system while maintaining high availability.

And yet, they were acquired for $19B. So it seems sometimes you can break the rules, if you know how.

This post was inspired by The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast episode Building Whatsapp with Jean Lee .