Having millions of DAU is potentially hard, but not the most manpower intensive part.
The hard part is monetizing.
What was the revenue Instagram and Whatsapp were collecting at the time of their acquisition? Likely 0.
The moment you start collecting money, signing contracts, besides the non engineering work like legal and finance, not to mention sales, you will need to do a lot of tracking whether you delivered what you claimed you sold.
Didnt Facebook get in trouble for exaggerating ad metrics?
And that's on top of all sorts regional compliance requirements over GDPR, cookies, which require both engineers building stuff as specified by legal, which wasnt required before because if you have no revenue, you dont really need to worry about getting sued or banned in the region.
The hard part is monetizing.
What was the revenue Instagram and Whatsapp were collecting at the time of their acquisition? Likely 0.
The moment you start collecting money, signing contracts, besides the non engineering work like legal and finance, not to mention sales, you will need to do a lot of tracking whether you delivered what you claimed you sold.
Didnt Facebook get in trouble for exaggerating ad metrics?
And that's on top of all sorts regional compliance requirements over GDPR, cookies, which require both engineers building stuff as specified by legal, which wasnt required before because if you have no revenue, you dont really need to worry about getting sued or banned in the region.