Catching up with Viber CMO Mark Hardy; 600 million users, 300 employees and one acquisition later
Tech.eu's Victoria Vzyatysheva recently caught up with Mark Hardy, the chief marketing officer of Viber, a popular messaging, calling and now gaming app. Check out her Q&A with the executive below:
Context & Ripple Effects
This Q&A lands a few months after Viber opened its gaming service to all users worldwide, and Hardy uses it to frame the company at scale — 600 million users run by only about 300 employees — with gaming now part of the pitch alongside messaging and calling.
The interview is also a snapshot before the strategy hardened: two years later Viber would appoint Djamel Agaoua as CEO ahead of a formal platform-strategy launch, and then move into commerce with the acquisition of ShopChat maker Chatter Commerce.
First-order effects
- Hardy is marketing Viber's reach — 600 million users on a 300-person team — to partners and press at the exact moment its games service goes global, making the app's audience the sellable asset.
Second-order effects
- The platform ambitions sketched here get institutionalized under Agaoua's CEO appointment and March strategy launch, and commerce follows through the Chatter Commerce/ShopChat acquisition with its CEO becoming Viber's global head of e-commerce.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Viber's trajectory — chat base first, then games, then group communities with moderator monetization and a billion registered users — points toward messaging apps consolidating into multi-service platforms where the chat layer distributes everything else.
The trend: Messaging apps are converting large chat user bases into distribution layers for adjacent services like gaming, commerce, and community monetization.