Comment by lxgr
2 years ago
Selling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use.
Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.
Why is it not an option when it already exists in many places (all these protections fail all the time)? Your first sentence doesn't imply high/expensive level of customer service
Besides, even now they're not ignoring all the complaints, the do fix bugs?
Maybe to be more specific, how much did it cost WhatsApp when they had $1 price and a tiny team? How does it compare to the cost of SMS?
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month. The year 2013 ended with $148 million in expenses, of which $138 million in losses.[1]
FB acquired them next year and if my memory is correct there were 19 in the team then.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
That $ figure tells us nothing as it includes those same huge SMS costs that Signal is on an unsustainable path to rack up
With just a bit more effort you can see that most of those $148 are not related to the extra customer support we're discussing, but rather to the things that Signal is already doing
Costs and expenses in 2013:
Cost of revenue 53 (payment processing fees, infrastructure costs, SMS verification fees and employee compensation for part of operations team)
R&D 77 (engineering and technical teams who are responsible for the design, development, and testing of the features)
G&A 19
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