After discussing with a Mr. XXX (a PhD student from a certain department at the UH) on the very hot topic of a 19 Billion dollar acquisition of WhatsApp, I thought a quick blog post was in order to tease out some things I’ve been mulling over about KakaoTalk.

There are a variety of ways in which a chatapp can report user statistics. For some chatapps, the prefered way to report user metrics is to refer to “total downloads” of chatapps. Another way to report user statistics is to refer to “registered users.” Finally, chatapp companies could report an X “active users” metric. So why does it matter which metric a company reports? Well, the obvious answer to me depends upon the how far along a chatapp company is on its path towards growth and engagement.

Take this as an example. Let’s say you opened a Tom N Toms in a certain area in Seoul (creative, I know). You offer around 500 tiny samples of coffee for your first month of business. People are buzzing about your business, people come by for your samples, but you don’t see people returning to match that free sample with a real purchase of your delicious coffee. As a coffee shop or a chatapp company, could you honestly report on those numbers as valid measures of customers or users? Probably not. In effect, that’s what you get when chatapp companies report “download” figures — it’s the coffee sample metric.

Next, let’s say that you do get customers who return to actually try out your Tom N Toms product in Seoul. They return, purchase a single cup of Iced Americano (it’s summer), and then disappear. Could you reliably attribute to this single-purchase event a new customer? Sure, why not. But a single purchase wouldn’t instill a tremendous amount of confidence in my relationship with that person — unless I see that person again, and again.The same principle should apply to how chatapps report “registered” figures. They are great. They provide a little more assurance that the user has engaged with the slightly more boring parts of the chatapp experience — registering it. So, there’s something there, but not much more.

Finally, you get your returning Korean customer, who buys a second cup Iced Americano, sits and reads a book, and then repeats that very same customer-type behavior over the following week. Eventually, you know the person’s coffee habits, and you are confident enough in your relationship with this person to say this is definition of a customer. For chatapps, the same idea applies when you get users who are called MAU: Monthly active users or X active users. This is the person who perhaps returns every day, chats, shares stickers, purchase virtual items, and posses a dense and deep social network of friends and family who are also users of that chatapp as well. It’s a solid metric. And it’s just the kind of thing you see WeChat and WhatsApp reporting.

This returns me back to the disagreement I was having with my Korean classmate about Korea’s own chatapp: Kakaotalk is a great app, but it’s about time it stop reporting only “registered user” metrics.