In January 2009, after Koum purchased an iPhone, he and Acton, keen to jump into what they saw foresaw as a newly burgeoning multi-million dollar app industry created by the Apple App Store, Koum came up with an idea for an app to provide dynamic information about the people listed in your address book: it would show statuses for each person, for example: "if you were on a call, your battery was low, or you were at the gym." Their discussions often took place at the home of Koum's Russian friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose. They realized that to take the idea further, they would need an iPhone developer. Fishman visited RentACoder.com, found Russian developer Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum.[60]
Koum named the app WhatsApp to sound like "what's up". On February 24, 2009, he incorporated[61] WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, when early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Koum considered giving up and looking for a new job. Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".[60]
In June 2009, when the app had been downloaded by only a handful of Fishman's Russian-speaking friends, Apple launched push notifications, allowing users to be pinged although not using a relevant app.
Koum updated WhatsApp so that everyone in the user's network would be notified when a user's status changed. This new facility, to Koum's surprise, was used by users to ping "each other with jokey custom statuses like, "I woke up late" or "I'm on my way."[60]
Suddenly a new kind of instant messaging facility had been born out of the chance capability that users found more useful than the app's intended purpose. Fishman said "At some point it sort of became instant messaging ... We started using it as 'Hey how are you?' And then someone would reply." Jan watched the changing statuses on a Mac Mini at his town house in Santa Clara, and realized he had unintentionally created a messaging service."[60]
WhatsApp 2.0 was released in August 2009 with a purpose-designed messaging component; the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000.
Although Acton was working on another startup idea, he decided to join the company.[25] In October 2009, Acton persuaded five former friends at Yahoo! to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. He officially joined WhatsApp on November 1.[25] After months at beta stage, the application launched in November 2009 on the App Store, exclusively for the iPhone. Koum then hired a friend in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop a BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.[25] Subsequently, WhatsApp for Symbian OS was added in May 2010, and for Android OS in August 2010.[62] In 2010 Google made multiple acquisition offers for WhatsApp, which were all declined.[63]
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