In the courier category the competition is getting stronger. While there are general purpose ones like Telegram or WhatsApp, there are others designed for group chats like Microsoft Teams or Zoom. But there is one that is different from all of them and that for years, despite its low profile, has not stopped growing. Is about Discord.
The San Francisco-based app is known for its free service that allows you to communicate via video, voice and text. Many of those stuck at home during the pandemic have increasingly used their technology to video games, study groups, dance classes, book clubs, and other virtual gatherings.
In its networks it has more than 150 million active users and the most remarkable thing is that it does not have advertising or sell the data of its clients. However, it is profitable thanks to the subscriptionwhich offer better emojis, animated avatars, high resolution video, and an increase in the size of the documents that are shared, up to 100 MB.
“It was designed differently from the beginning. It’s important to know that Discord doesn’t have any posting walls: nothing is going to go viral. You don’t need to be scrolling infinitely. Thanks to subscriptions, we have built a strong and healthy business to date without the need to offer ads or sell our users’ data,” he said. Jason Lemonhis founder.
Discord stands out for not offering advertising or selling the data of its users. Photo Bloomberg
Such was the popularity that it garnered that, last year, Microsoft was about to acquire it. But finally, the popular social network of “chatrooms” rejected the purchase offer to focus on going public and remain as an independent entity.
For Microsoft, the acquisition of Discord was a strategic step to have a presence in social networks beyond Linkedin, which it bought for just over 26,000 million dollars in 2016. In addition, the step was seen as a move to reinforce its presence in video game through integration with the popular Xbox.
Due to this courageous decision, the name of its founder begins to gain notoriety among analysts and investors, who see a promising future in this nascent giant.
The company’s most radical turnaround occurred at the beginning of the pandemic. In June 2020, Citron and its co-founder and chief technology officer, Stanislav Vishnevskiywrote a blog post acknowledging that Discord was he had moved away from video games and was working to be more accessible to everyone.
Discord’s story
Discord, the gaming community platform that Microsoft wants to buy. Photo Discord
In 2015, Jason Citron, as a programmer, was having a hard time making his way in the video game industry. The new multiplayer title he had created with his development studio, Hammer & Chisel, was not reaching the desired levels of popularity.
Thus, Citron made a radical change. He fired game developers from his company and turned the game’s chat feature – an element that many rated as valuable– on his only product and gave it a mysterious name: Discord.
At first it was not easy. “I think at the time we had about six users and I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work,” Citron acknowledges.
Before Discord, Citron ran the gaming social network OpenFeint, which he sold in 2011 to a Japanese company for $104 million. Since then, he is considered an innovator because he had tried to capture the attention of gamers through social interactions with his friends, a new strategy in the nascent mobile video game market.