Korea’s dominant mobile messaging app, KakaoTalk, is enjoying remarkably high user growth. The KakaoTalk team clued us in to some interesting data that journals the app’s growth over the last two years. Using the data, we plotted the graph below which shows a hockey stick growth curve that many startups will be looking at with envious eyes. KakaoTalk currently has 89 million users and is closing in onto 90 million. On a related note, KakaoTalk’s competitor Line recently crossed the 150 million user mark while WeChat reportedly has over 300 million users in total with 40 million users outside of China.
While many chat apps have found it hard to monetize their services during the early days, KakaoTalk was the first to introduce games onto its platform. The results were excellent and other chat apps followed suit after seeing KakaoTalk’s success. At our Startup Asia Singapore conference last month, co-CEO Sirgoo Lee shared that Kakao Corp generated $45 million in revenue with $7 million in profits last year.
In our recent trip to Korea, we visited Kakao Corp’s office and also did an interview with co-founder JB Lee to find out more about KakaoTalk’s founding story. So stay tuned!
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