Viewing profile — anuh

First, writing stories on Olympic game results required data, and Toutiao pulled it from three sources: [a] real time score updates from the Olympics organization, [b] images from …

Once a question is submitted, the AI engine automatically recommends a list of relevant experts/potential answerers to the questioner to choose from. As a user you can choose who y…

Toutiao is now focused on video as it is increasingly becoming more important (more supply of video content and more consumption as well). Outside of Chinese language centric marke…

I can’t convince you to be a believer :) That is totally up to you!

I am afraid I cannot do justice to this question by answering it in a few sentences in this forum. Toutiao is one of the first apps in China to enable creators to write content and…

Engagement alone is not success but sustainable and improving engagement (I.e. strong and improving cohort retention) is a measure of success because it creates a high barrier of e…

Good point. I believe Toutiao tries to show different content ocassionally to solve the exact problem you are describing. There may be new areas or other hot trending topics especi…

It is a mobile first app :) I don’t think they want anyone going to their website!

Good question. They did not have many social features at the start - especially in year 1 (no followers, no friends, no chat). Over time they added like, dislike, retweet, comments…

Nope. I have known the company from before my time at YC.

Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.

If you have only a small sample size to experiment with then you need to run experiments that can cause dramatic lifts (not minor changes like moving a link, etc.) Because if you h…

Yes. We plan to! There are so many nuances with B2B that we felt it deserved a separate post. Having said that products like Slack (though B2B) is a lot similar to how a consumer a…

Great question. This really has to come top down and starts with the CEO. If the CEO urges the team to focus on the right metrics and asks questions on weekly reports then over tim…

Hi Eveyone, I am Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.

There were quite a few local Chinese competitors to WeChat when it originally launched. It took them almost a year to surpass Xiaomi's MiTalk user numbers.

Before they turned on red packets they had only 300M MAUs. They do claim that red packets was a critical growth lever for them for new users

Relationships with carriers is not new. WhatsApp negotiated a lot of carrier relationships in India early on. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/10/whatsapps...

It is not a monopoly play by any means. Alipay is a big competitor of TencentPay and bigger than WeChatPay. Also though the app supports so many features and services, it has a rea…

50% of WeChat users use it for 90 mins. Also the team really focuses on user efficiency -I.e.,, completing the task quickly and in the most efficient way

That's a fair point! I was also amazed into how much thought went into when to notify and really protecting user experience

Yes. Shake and Message in a bottle features were used in that context in the early days.

I think WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code - both of which failed in the US. These two features were critical to support so many us…