With over 200 million users worldwide, many of whom are in Asia, Israeli messaging app Viber has established itself as a name to watch in the messaging space throughout the continent.
So what are Viber’s plans for Asia in 2014? At the Startup Asia Jakarta, we sit down with Viber CEO and co-founder Talmon Marco to find out how he built Viber to become the respected mobile company it is today and what lies ahead for its future:
Marco opened the stage saying Viber adds half a million users everyday. Before Viber, he started iMesh, a peer-to-peer media sharing client.
Launched in December 2010, Viber started with voice and slowly entered messaging a few months later. The difference between Skype and Viber is that most Skype calls are scheduled, while Viber is more spontaneous. Within the three months after launch, there were 10 people on the team.
Viber depends on strength of the product to grow the number of users. If he had to choose again, Marco would put money in R&D instead of media. Out of 120 staff at Viber, 100 of them are in R&D.
Viber got 100,000 users in the first 24 hours after launch. By the end of the third day, it reached the millions. With every platform that the company adds, it sees strong growth. Everything it does for one of its user groups reflects the virality of other user groups. Viber adds features that its staff would want to use. Internal staff phone calls and messages are only made through Viber.
Marco says that when he started developing the app, he knew it’d be a success. Tip for other startups: check with your friends first. If your friends are not interested, then you have nothing. When you start, make sure it’s scalable. Viber also learned this the hard way. When it hit several million users, the app didn’t respond, so it needed some rewriting. Lesson learned: ”You can never be fully scalable.”
Viber’s philosophy is “everything is blank.” You don’t need to develop everything that users want. In 2011, people complained there was no voice function on Blackberry, so the company released it but it wasn’t a great success. Each version of Viber’s management is assigned to an app store. The team has to read every comment on each app store.
Viber and the sticker store: There are 20 people working on it around the world. Marco says Viber is pretty much like Violet (the Viber sticker mascot) – the app tries to be minimalistic to stay true to its western heritage, but it still has the fun sticker-loving Asian side.
Marco on the chat app battle: in some markets, there’s already a winner such as in Korea where KakaoTalk dominates the market. At the same time, people were saying the same thing about Line and Facebook. Looking forward, you will see winners in various countries, but they are not going to be the same winner.
Strategy that matters to Viber is not monetization, but content and user experience, says Marco. It created stickers to give customers the best experience.
Marco says in five to 10 years, users will be able to move from one device or carrier to another without loyalty. But the mobile apps will adapt.
When it comes to data pricing, we will start to see the race to the bottom in countries like Japan and the US, where most carriers sell packages. This trend is not happening in Europe yet, but we will see it happen. Viber works with some carriers to offer the app with free data costs.
Marco’s comment on SnapChat being worth $3 billion: Marco doesn’t believe it’s a competitor. If Snapchat wants to add messaging and branch out, they have to add more buttons and fuctions, which sacrifices its identity. It will become WhatsApp or Viber. Marco says the pictures on Snapchat don’t really disappear. There’s no way you as a user can know if the picture is really gone. Over time, users will understand that.
Viber takes on the NSA: Marco says privacy is definitely a concern. As of today, Viber never provided any messages or voice to any government. But he would never say that the company was never asked. What ended up happening is that Viber was blocked in Saudi Arabia. The company takes the stance that it will never allow any government to listen to its customers’ conversations.
“It’s not that rare for an entreprenuer to be successful”. Talking about money, Marco comments that Viber starts to generate revenue as it launched Sticker. When the typhoon struck the Philippines, the company opened the platform for emergencies in which international calls — both incoming and outgoing — could be made for free. This new feature is called Viber Out, and soft launching after the hurricane in the Philippines, Viber will roll this out in other countries as a regular feature on the app.
Source: Techinasia
