The 2 friends stuck together and traveled around the world (mainly South America) for a year, living off their healthy savings. Little by little, the idea of what to do next started forming, and Jan wanted to create his own iPhone app. This was the beginning of the real journey for him. The one of passion and meaning.

The beginning

Jan’s idea was to have an app that would show the exact same as your address book in your phone, but with statuses next to each individual name. “At the gym”, “Eating with family”, “Out for a run”…

Jan had the skills to do the backend of the project, but he didn’t know how to code an iPhone app. Neither did his friend Acton. He found a coder on rentacoder.com, and they worked together on a first iteration. Jan even already had the name for his project: WhatsApp. He incorporated the name on February 24, 2009.

As often the case with these success stories, the first version of the app was highly unstable. It kept crashing, and only a few hundred people downloaded the app on their phones. As it turned out, a lot of these guys were part of the Russian community Jan was hanging out with, not organic users. It was pretty discouraging, and he started to think he should go back to a normal job. It had been a fun project, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. But then, just as he was about to give up, an opportunity for major growth presented itself.

The growth

Apple came out with a new feature aimed at developers in June 2009: push notifications. Developers could now ping users on the home screen when they were not using the app. Nowadays, we can’t even think of a phone without app notifications, but at the time, this was brand new. In the case of Whatsapp, it meant that the app could now show status updates on the home screen. Anytime somebody would change their status, their friends would get a notification, right there in their pocket.

This new functionality took an even more surprising turn when people started to use Whatsapp notifications almost as instant messaging. They would update their status all the time: “On my way”, “Where are you?”, “I’m running late”… At the time, all this required was an internet connection, and that was a lot cheaper than sending a text. Jan realized he had created a free instant messaging app, almost by accident. Unlike any other solution on the market at the time, your login was your phone number, no account needed. Instant, fast and simple.

When they realized users were using statuses as messaging, the Whatsapp team released their official V2, with an actual messaging feature. All of the sudden, their active user base skyrocketed to 250,000. This looked promising.

Jan went to see his friend Acton, the guy from Yahoo, who was still figuring things out himself. He showed him his project. The potential was huge. Using the internet, you could send things like pictures, videos, documents… At no cost, and in a much more efficient way than by using SMS. Acton was hooked, and together with Jan, they got 5 of their Yahoo buddies to invest $250,000. Jan and Acton owned 60% of the company, and the others the remaining 40%.

Soon, Whatsapp released its app for other devices than iPhones. Mainly, Blackberries and Android phones (which at the time didn’t run the same OS). Whatsapp started to bring in revenue when it switched from a free app to a paid app. To the team’s surprise, this didn’t hinder the number of downloads, nor of active users. People were willing to pay $1 per year to get access to year-round free texting.

Hitting it big

In 2011, WhatsApp entered the Top 20 apps on the Apple Appstore. They agreed to an $8 million funding round from Sequoia Capital. In 2013, Whatsapp’s active user base was 200 million. It had 50 employees and needed more money, which came from Sequoia again. The firm pumped in $50 million, bringing the company valuation to $1.5 billion. A year later, in 2014, Facebook announced plans to purchase Whatsapp, for one of the biggest deals in the history of Silicon Valley: $19 billion, including $4 billion in cash.

The sale concluded in October, making Jan Koum and his friend Acton instant billionaires. Today, WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion users in 180 countries. It is the most popular messaging app in the world, beating Facebook messenger by 200 million users. 65 billion Whatsapp messages are sent every day, while 55 million Whatsapp video calls take place. It is one of the biggest mobile app success stories in Silicon Valley, and it all started with an address book status app used by a few hundred people.

Jan Koum immigrated to the USA as a teenager, got a well-paying engineer job at Yahoo, and ended up growing tired of it. He took a year to figure things out and got his idea a little after that. His original invention morphed into the number one messaging app in the world almost by accident. Although he became discouraged at times, he always pushed through, and he ended up signing one of the most lucrative acquisitions in Silicon valley’s history.

Jan actually signed the paperwork for the $19 billion deal on the walls of the building where he used to stand in line to collect food stamps. Today, Jan is worth over $10 billion dollars and lives in a $100 million Malibu Mansion. Jan doesn’t want to be called an entrepreneur, because he says they are motivated by money. All he ever wanted to do was to build a useful product, not to make billions of dollars. Money is only a byproduct of success, not an end goal in itself. That’s a useful lesson to remember.

Read this awesome article and clap for the writer at https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-this-man-created-the-number-one-messaging-app-in-the-world-3b4d17de9d15