> What do you mean you have 4 million customers and a support staff of 20?
Sure to the rest, but: Whatsapp had 55 employees and 450 million users when it was acquired. It's at least conceivable to tell a story (lie) that's two orders of magnitude smaller. (And the real number was "only" off by one zero.)
Whatsapp elaborately explained how it was doing this to the public, it was with a technology (Erlang/OTP) that had rarely been used before, and that technology had been designed for and very successful in an almost identically shaped context (telecom switches.)
Also, more obviously, people you knew were using it every day. 450M is different than 4M, and way different than 300K. If Whatsapp were lying and saying they had 4.5B users, I'd expect JP Morgan to catch that within a few hours, too.
> Whatsapp elaborately explained how it was doing this to the public, it was with a technology (Erlang/OTP) that had rarely been used before, and that technology had been designed for and very successful in an almost identically shaped context (telecom switches.)
Sure. But the point is, Whatsapp had 0.5 total employees per 4 million users, and Frank had 20 support employees per 4 million supposed users.
Even if you think Whatsapp has a massive advantage, those numbers don't make it look like Frank is the one that's lacking in staff.
> Also, more obviously, people you knew were using it every day. 450M is different than 4M, and way different than 300K. If Whatsapp were lying and saying they had 4.5B users, I'd expect JP Morgan to catch that within a few hours, too.
For these reasons it would be much harder for Whatsapp to lie that way.
The corollary of that is it would be much easier for Frank to do it.
WhatsApp doesn’t need staff because they weren’t processing regulated financial transactions. Thr app operated in a best efforts basis since it was mostly free. You don’t need customer support staff for that — there is no support.
FWIW, around 1/3 of the 55 were customer support. That's not a lot of support per user, but it's not none. And it is enough to get lots of feedback to engineering about things users are having trouble with, because the better you make the product, the less overloaded customer support is.
> Whatsapp had 55 employees and 450 million users when it was acquired.
WeWork had the opposite problem. A lot of employees and expenses and not enough paying users. Having lots of employees and lots of expenses by itself doesn't mean much. WeWork still got billions in funding. Due diligence was an issue there as well.
Consider it holistically, rather than one at a time. Every company has its own footprint of "per customer" resource usage, and every company probably has unusually low aspects one way or another, but when a company comes back as "low" to "very low" for every such metric, it's time to investigate harder. Maybe they're just that genius, or maybe there's something about the company you don't understand yet, or maybe they're cheating you... the whole point of due diligence is to resolve those "maybes" into "certainlies", because they all factor in to your decisions.
> Sure to the rest, but: Whatsapp had 55 employees and 450 million users when it was acquired.
JPM regularly acquires businesses that do not look like WhatsApp and look more like Frank. For 99% of the acquirers out there, seeing a business with $450m in ARR with 55 employees definitely makes your eyes bulge.
Sure to the rest, but: Whatsapp had 55 employees and 450 million users when it was acquired. It's at least conceivable to tell a story (lie) that's two orders of magnitude smaller. (And the real number was "only" off by one zero.)