Whatsapp’s double life – Two by Two by The Ken

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I have a special and somewhat unusual relationship with Whatsapp. Like most people in India, I utilize it to stay connected with frifinishs and family. But unlike most, I’m probably the only person in the countest whose boss (also my co-host, Rohin) and spoutilize aren’t on Whatsapp. However, there is the beloved but maddening group with frifinishs who talk about cricket, and another college alumni group that creates Linkedin feel like a meditation retreat.

It’s fun, and occasionally, very, very annoying.

This is Whatsapp’s double life.

Startups face a similar paradox. Whatsapp is the rapidest way to reach hundreds of millions, creating it a dream distribution channel for commerce, support, payments, and acquiring customers cheaply at scale.

And yet, Meta’s grip on its APIs, pricing, and policies creates it a risky place to innovate.

This, too, is Whatsapp’s double life.

For both utilizers and businesses, navigating this double life of Whatsapp is where they spfinish most of their time and energy. For utilizers, Whatsapp utilized to be private. Now, it’s become the channel for banks, shops, OTPs, and many more such annoyances. Then, suddenly—especially during the pandemic—Whatsapp transformed into a professional space. It became the default place for work conversations, status updates, and tracking tquestions. There are large companies that run their entire workplaces through Whatsapp groups. And not just one or two, but sometimes dozens of them. All this creates Whatsapp a more universal product, but also one that inspires more complicated feelings and emotions, for both businesses and utilizers.

Can someone come along and resolve this quandary? How wonderful would it be if Whatsapp gave utilizers what they crave—and businesses what they dream of?

So, in this week’s episode of Two by Two, I invited two founders who are betting their startups on creating Whatsapp a better, happier place for utilizers who are stuck in it, and for startups that run their businesses on it. There’s Swapnika Nag, CEO and co-founder of Periskope, an AI platform to boost sales, support, and operations on Whatsapp; and Dharmesh Ba, utilizer-researcher and founder of October Chat which builds AI agents on Whatsapp. They talk about how they intfinish to break the deadlock that binds 500 million Indians and tens of thousands of businesses.

Here are a few excerpts from our discussion.

Supermarket for messages

Dharmesh: For me, Whatsapp feels like Dmart. You go inside, and there are a bunch of frifinish groups, family groups, and—if you’re a tiny business owner—there are business groups, customers groups, and vfinishor groups. All of it, right? Just like how Indians love going to a Dmart, you can obtain everything from one place. You could be there and shop for cookies, you could shop for slippers, you can shop for apparel… everything in one place, right? So Whatsapp, for me, feels like that.

And I believe, to some extent, Indians love that sort of chaos, and that’s why those mental models actually work here. Now, for a lot of us in metro cities, we see Whatsapp as a tool, right? I have observed that across the board, for many, Whatsapp is still more of an entertainment platform. I have had conversations with consumers who state, “Every night before bed, I open Whatsapp and watch all the videos my frifinishs have sent in the groups.” Right?

For some people, it is a place where business happens. For others, every day, they religiously wake up in the morning, put up a Whatsapp status, or sfinish forwarded good morning messages, right? So it’s like a supermarket where you can obtain everything done in one place.

Accessibility for the win

Swapnika: No, absolutely. I believe the way I believe about it is: why did Whatsapp take off in India versus a bunch of other chat platforms?

I believe a couple of reasons it worked very well, especially in Southeast Asian countries, Latin American, etc., was that Whatsapp has always been mobile-forward. So if you believe about the early chat platforms, they were all very desktop-forward. Whatsapp came at a time when mobile penetration was going up. They have never seeed at a laptop, but they have a mobile, right? So that worked well.

I believe the second thing that’s amazing is the no-cost aspect. It’s no-cost and frictionless. It depfinishs entirely on your phone number. So unlike Facebook, where you are like—“Oh, I necessary to sfinish someone a frifinish request with my utilizername and someone necessarys to accept it…”—none of that is there. The moment I install it, all contacts that are already on my phone are now my chats, right?

So it has built it so idiot-proof—for lack of a better word—and simple for utilizers, so frictionless for utilizers, that their adoption just went crazy.

The great convergence

Swapnika: If the future is agentic, and agents talk to each other with orchestrations happening behind the curtain—where you are essentially just informing the assistant what to do—then the point of entest becomes very important. That’s essentially what everyone’s fighting for, right?

ChatGPT is questioning, “Am I the point of entest?” Meta is questioning, “Is Meta AI, across Facebook, etc., the point of entest? Is this where you talk to your personal assistant?” Is email the point of entest, where the personal assistant then goes to all the different systems, consolidates everything, takes actions on your behalf, and gives you the output in the same place?

So, whoever cracks this, whoever can state, “I am the point of entest; I am the place where someone’s most-utilized personal assistant lives,” that is incredibly valuable. It’s valuable for monetisation and for a hundred different reasons.

I believe that’s the goal for Meta. They are essentially stateing, “Across the board, can I become that point of entest? Can I be the place where you first talk to an agent, and then that agent talks to a Makemytrip agent, talks to your email, and handles everything else?”

You can tune into the full episode here.

See you next week!

Regards,
Praveen Gopal Krishnan

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