How KakaoTalk Grew From a Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform (INTERVIEW)

With over 90 million users today, KakaoTalk’s success seems like an overnight fairytale. It isn’t. The company has had its fair share of struggles. Like any startup, Kakao’s road to success was paved with blood and sweat.

In December 2003, JB Lee graduated from Seoul National University. Upon graduation, he founded a company that does document solutions for web and mobile. While working on that, he got to know Brian Kim, an influential figure in Korea’s tech ecosystem. Brian founded Hangame, a giant gaming company, which eventually merged with search engine Naver to form NHN.

Together with Brian, the duo founded IWILAB in 2006 and started to work on several web 2.0 projects but with only limited success. Things began to change when the first smartphone was introduced in Korea in 2009 and eventually went mainstream. It was then that some of the team saw the opportunity to build a world-class smartphone application.

Unfortunately, not everyone was convinced. The team was torn between building products for PC and mobile, and only after much discussion did Brian and JB decide that going mobile was the way to go. Not everyone was happy about that choice, but JB says the decision was a pivotal moment for the company:

The atmosphere during the discussion was very miserable and depressing. Brian came out with the idea of mobile smartphone apps. There was a lot discussion and debate. But we came to the conclusion to focus on mobile.

Having made the decision to focus on mobile, the team didn’t know exactly what to work on. There were a number of ideas. So in the end, the team formed three groups to work on different projects.

KakaoTalk was born

One of the ideas was KakaoTalk, which was launched on March 2010. With zero ad spending, KakaoTalk grew very quickly and organically while the other two applications were unfortunately getting little traction. The team made the decision to shut down the other applications to focus on KakaoTalk and IWILAB’s corporate name was eventually also changed to Kakao.

By September 2010, six months after it was launched, KakaoTalk had already recorded one million users. Three months later, in December 2010, KakaoTalk hit five million users. The growth didn’t stop and in fact, it accelerated. Today, KakaoTalk is used by over 90 million people worldwide and is expanding aggressively in Vietnam and Indonesia. I was curious as to how a young company like Kakao Corp could manage this explosive growth so well. JB was quick to credit his team. He said:

We have very experienced engineers who have worked at big companies such as NHN before. Our CTO, Young Lee, who used to work for NHN, has a very strong engineering background. He has experience dealing with huge traffic loads. Brian and our CFO, Dean Song, who used to work at CJ internet, also help KakaoTalk manage its fast growth.

Kakao’s smart funding

Users define Kakao’s Future