American Fortune Life

At noon on July 28, Andy ended his‘ payback ’in Washington, D.C., when the convoy came out of the airport and headed straight to WhatsApp headquarters. Speaking of WhatsApp HQ, I'm sure everyone will have a weird head shake laugh, because it's definitely the “best" of all Silicon Valley businesses.

Because, to date, the mysterious WhatsApp has still not been clearly positioned by the vast majority of the outside world, only in this hillscape neighborhood in Silicon Valley...

Messages circulated from outside were also revealed by some journalists who visited WhatsApp headquarters at a one-and-a-half point. WhatsApp was set up in a very ordinary office building with no sign outside, no logo on the company's doorstep, and journalists were not allowed to disclose their addresses to the public, and a confidentiality agreement was signed if they wanted to interview.

For this reason, Andy has held special meetings since the inception of WhatsApp, advising everyone not to reveal their address to the media, only to know that the office is located in a neighborhood in Mountain View City District.

More disturbingly, WhatsApp wrote “We're hiding in the corner of Silicon Valley" on all of its external material, but with a zip code attached to it, the cunning connotation of former adolescent boys making fun of others.

Of course, apart from being a mystery, which has some mischievous connotations, in the end, Andy's intentional purpose of keeping the mystery so secret is not intentional and outside good offices, which is actually a reason for people to remain anonymous online. Andy is protecting his employees and office space from disruption, allowing his own employees to drill technology to deliver the perfect product service.

In fact, Andy followed the company name WhatsApp, also because it was a bit disgusting. Read WhatsApp faster. Doesn't that sound like a slightly toned greeting “What 'sup” in English?

This witty tune has long been interpreted by the media as meaning that he, Andy Smith, greeted Facebook, and as some of the functions of the two companies coincided, the meaning of this greeting became even more interesting.

When Andy walked into the office building with all the bodyguards, the front desk hurried up to greet him, and Andy just smiled and nodded and stepped on the steps lightly, going up to the third floor, in the office lobby on the third floor, the front wall was written by Andy "No Advertisement! No games, no gimmicks!” One sentence, made into a big slogan, empty, at a time of lunch break. Programmers and engineers' tables are littered with headphones, exquisite headset racks, LEGO models, and dart discs. Each table is equipped with an Apple desktop with a metallic shine.

The office Andy used was hidden in the furthest corner. The white door was closed, with a flourishing green plant standing on each side of the door, almost covering the door.

Pushing in, fairly spacious, well-lit office, very clean and cool. This is less of an office that Andy often uses, all of which are very simple to decorate, a cobblestone-like sofa, and a few bluecloth chairs. And a desk of two meters and four, besides computers and computers, a few movie posters belonging to his goddesses in the past are the most typical decorations, nothing more.

Though the company knew he was coming to the company today, Andy didn't want to entertain executives and subordinates to greet themselves, and he didn't want to bring them into the company about the blunt-headed brains.

Do it on the boss chair, Andy, open the drawer, take out two walkie-talkies from inside, turn one on, tweak, and say to the walkie-talkie, "I'm Andy Smith, I'm Andy Smith, Jane Coom and Brian, come in when you hear... ”

“Sha-doo...”

“Good afternoon, boss. I'm Jane. Brian's next door. We'll see you soon. ”

After hearing the voice from the walkie-talkie, Andy nodded satisfactorily and then gave a word of advice, he turned off the walkie-talkie, sat on the boss chair, Andy was emotional, WhatsApp was moving toward connecting 500 million people, and being able to reach this level of service had immeasurable value, how could Andy not be excited? This is also an achievement he personally promoted to make the world more open and connected.

Jane Coom and Brian Acton are the talent Andy dug up from Yahoo, Jane Coom is the technology, Brian Acton is the CEO, WhatsApp is the operation, the talent and cooperation of the two, Andy is very satisfied.

Since the launch of WhatsApp, its development can be described as rapid. Last November, WhatsApp had 200 million monthly active users, compared to 300 million in February this year. Today, WhatsApp has soared to 500 million monthly active users, 70% of whom log in daily. WhatsApp now adds 1 million new users every day, sending messages on a daily basis to the global telecom SMS count, with 1 billion photos and 200 million audio messages every day.

Amazing performance in user growth, thanks to WhatsApp's dedication to making its products easier to use, even without the need for users to create a username or password. It is because of its simplicity that WhatsApp has created a classic growth myth.

Although Andy originally developed new instant messaging software drawing on several APP features, Andy also went through some screening to keep the software simple and free from advertising harassment.

One of the biggest features that has been improved at the same time is that you can show this message if it has been read. A successful message displays a green tick in the bottom right corner of the box, and it displays two ticks once it has been read.

As someone standing on the shoulder of a giant, Andy naturally knows how to grab young people in order to grasp the rationale of the market, so with Watsop you can show when they first appear, and finally online time, you can deduce whether it's convenient to connect with each other now, very suitable for the ambiguous implication of quietly sprouting, making Watsop immediately more conducive to the opening up of young Americans to grasp the company's JIAO scale of hot dating app.

WhatsApp maintains cartoon expressions, is already in circles of friends, ready to circle money with a public account, but also directly removes all sorts of amazing experiences like gaming, news, shopping, and even voice features that were only recently released. But it's expensive and simple, no advertising harassment, no dazzling features. Perhaps even more so because WhatsApp is a local product, Americans love this app very much.

“ Don't worry, we need to focus more on business sustainability than how fast it can grow and make a profit. Believe me, the bigger WhatsApp gets in the future, the bigger it becomes, the bigger it becomes. ”

In the office, Andy looked at the next stage of Watsop's development plan and smiled at the technical director and CEO sitting across the street and said, "Advertising keeps us looking for better cars, more expensive clothes. We'll be delayed by the ad, so we choose to stay away from it. ”

“I totally agree with that!” Jane Coom glanced at Brian, the CEO sitting next to her, and then looked at her boss and continued: "No one wants to face the indiscriminate bombardment of ads just as soon as they open their eyes in the morning, and no one wants to sleep with the ads. We know that users would prefer to be able to chat with friends without disturbance.

We hope WhatsApp is such a product. Advertising not only disrupts the aesthetic design of a product, it also disrupts the privacy of users. Companies that sell ads in their apps, an important part of their engineering team's work on a daily basis, is collecting user data to deliver more accurate ads to users.

In this case, the user becomes a product. And we at Watspur, our engineers spend all our time and energy on perfecting products, we constantly fix product vulnerabilities, add new features, etc. We can make all users understand that we have no interest in their privacy data! ”

“We can tell our users that we understand this, and sometimes we have to sell emotions, to let our users know that Watsop is not just a cold technology product, it's a household product, it's not just a product, it's a concept, it's a value, it's a way of life.” Andy's eyes were slightly bright and personal privacy was very important to Americans, and using this as a propaganda point would undoubtedly scratch their itches.

Although Andy is also using these big data to drive the development of AI programs, he never intended to sell them with user data, even though almost all network companies are doing so, but he knew that sooner or later something would happen and that the impact would be much worse than the small amount of money that he now earns, which is why he looked at and agreed to acquire data self-destruct technology.

“Boss, WhatsApp is the only software ever likely to be used extensively, it has more participation and now has more people using it every day than Facebook... Based on our experience in building strong growth and broadly participatory global services, we believe WhatsApp users will exceed 1 billion in the coming years.

However, we also have to consider that WhatsApp will eventually slow down in the future. Both Facebook and INS are already facing this problem, and as the user base grows, new users naturally become harder to find. And our real problem is that the natural growth ceiling of Wazoop is built on the ceiling of a large mobile phone network. ”

cEO Brian was not concerned with Watsop's technology and functionality, he was more concerned with how to expand the market, how to make money, and as a technology company that had taken off, he really thought Watsop was doing business, not just fulfilling his professional manager's professional ethics, and he put a lot of effort into that.