On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat • Hacker News Board

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#81

Post by bsder » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #36

nebabyte wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WeChat is lightyears ahead of what the west can offer , in terms of product. It has many many useful features and is smooth, reliable As a westerner, is there like a list of such use cases to help get the point across? The things I've read so far here sound like the kind of things we already have offerings for too (making travel easier or etc), just not usually all under one roof. Sending money via text is a great…

I have lived in China for 6 months, and from the top of my head: - Voice/Text Chat - (Video) calling - Payment service (like Apple or Android pay) - Buy movie tickets - Buy plane tickets - Send money via Chat. - Splitt the bills. - Pay the government (utility companies etc) directly from WeChat - Find people nearby (like tinder? But less so than TanTan) - Chat on desktop (like whatsapp web, but native client) - Log o…

The entrenched monopolies have been actively fighting allowing use of your phone for universal payment. Visa/Mastercard/et al. (rightly, in my opinion) view that as an existential threat.

This is the real reason that we can't do this on phones in the West.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#82

Post by EnFinlay » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 9:58 PM UTC

> To summarize, the WeChat team found ways to be scrappy, compete with their own products, built features that answered cultural needs and emphasized group interactions and most of all they have relentlessly focused on creating a simple tool that could extend into the hands of every mobile consumer.

The summary misses the biggest lesson from the article! WeChat was able to get such amazing engagement and retention because it never attempted to milk a single facet for all it was worth. The model wasn't to maximize revenue before it broke the addiction.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#83

Post by EnFinlay » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:06 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #70

state wrote: post #14

"WeChat defies the popular belief that growth is all about user growth. Instead they think about growth as increasing value (e.g., the number of tasks WeChat can do in the daily lives of users). Unlike other social products, WeChat does not only measure growth by number of users or messages sent. Instead they also focus on measuring how deeply is the product engaged in every aspect of daily life (e.g., the number of…

> 100 times this. I can't think of a single large Western consumer software company who can actually think like that. I'm pretty sure execs from Google/Facebook/Apple think like this, it's just you don't read about it on TechCrunch, nor do they publicize it to their investors.

I would disagree with this. Facebook definitely has no problem creating an endless stream of content with >5% ad density.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#84

Post by chillacy » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:37 PM UTC

state wrote: post #18

vtange wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there inherent risk in centralizing / relying on one app for so many activities? There are already many in the West that try to avoid relying on everything Facebook or Google due to privacy/security concerns. I'm surprised that Chinese are willing to put all their eggs in WeChat's basket, given their belief that American apps spy on their users.

That's exactly what makes the problem so interesting. The user experience of WeChat is clearly great, but that level of centralization really wouldn't fly over here.

I dunno, I'm pretty tied into the Apple ecosystem. I'm only okay with it because they're very principled on privacy, and will probably be around for a long time. But all my photos, contacts, and lots of my data are all with apple. I suspect many users have even more tied up with Google on Android.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#85

Post by anuh » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 11:29 PM UTC

abalone wrote: post #73

> We partnered up with China Tech Insights, a research group within Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) to understand how WeChat drives its 889 Million monthly active users... I've always wondered if WeChat benefitted from something particular to the Chinese context, for example, favorable government support.[1] This is not exactly the sort of stellar investigative methodology that's going to answer that question. In f…

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 use cases that WeChat enables today (payments, peer to peer transfers, offline to online service). Yes the Chinese New Year helped garner interest and a lot of people use WeChat to send red packets, they also connected their bank accounts and started using it for payments. This is again in line with how WeChat launches every feature. They try to launch it in groups rather than getting each individual user to try it separately.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#86

Post by dilemma » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 11:29 PM UTC

lewisl9029 wrote: post #80

I remember watching this video a while ago by Nathan Freitas on the ability of the Chinese government to inspect, censor and control private communications through cooperation with apps like WeChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk In it, Nathan brings up a very alarming point in that Chinese communication apps like WeChat have extremely robust inspection and censorship features built-in to the app, that w…

>By exporting WeChat, China not just exporting a chat app, but also exporting a vital function of its Great Firewall: it's ability to control communications between citizens within it. Even for democratic states like India, where WeChat is starting to gain a foothold, this could pose a very real threat to freedom of speech if WeChat were ever to become dominant, and greatly increases the potential power of government should they ever want to overreach for it.

Reminds me of Facebook, Twitter, Google.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#87

Post by anuh » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 11:34 PM UTC

huula wrote: post #74

Now nobody talk about the "dating app" image wechat held in its early years, which brought it a lot of users.

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

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#88

Post by dmix » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 11:36 PM UTC

> Lesson 1: Build Your Own Competition

Imagine cable/media companies or Blockbuster did what Tencent did with WeChat and Amazon did with Kindle? Focus on product development even if it means potentially cannibalizing you're existing business...

Instead Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are totally dominating the marketplace for online video content and the TV studios will soon rely more and more on their platforms, platforms that are now spending billions to compete with them on content creation.

Amazon is also publishing books too, competing with the bigger publishers to some extent [1]. They should consider going harder into this space like they did with movie/TV production.

This is a great aspect of tech companies that 'traditional' ones continually overlook. Being future looking not protective.

[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/signin?language=en_US

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#89

Post by xanderstrike » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 11:40 PM UTC

jsfitzsimmons wrote: post #64

apexalpha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lived in China for 6 months, and from the top of my head: - Voice/Text Chat - (Video) calling - Payment service (like Apple or Android pay) - Buy movie tickets - Buy plane tickets - Send money via Chat. - Splitt the bills. - Pay the government (utility companies etc) directly from WeChat - Find people nearby (like tinder? But less so than TanTan) - Chat on desktop (like whatsapp web, but native client) - Log o…

Does it have end to end encryption though? That's kind of a killer feature.

No it has built-in tools for sharing your messages with state actors.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#90

Post by homarp » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 12:14 AM UTC

lewisl9029 wrote: post #80

I remember watching this video a while ago by Nathan Freitas on the ability of the Chinese government to inspect, censor and control private communications through cooperation with apps like WeChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk In it, Nathan brings up a very alarming point in that Chinese communication apps like WeChat have extremely robust inspection and censorship features built-in to the app, that w…

as of now, the Wechat accounts "activated" in China and the wechat accounts activated outside China have slightly different rules, to the point that you can have a 'non-chinese' account that create contents which can only be seen by 'non-chinese' accounts (and without any UI information about it).

Chinese accounts can also be 'semi-banned' where they will be able to read, but not to post video or audio anymore nor talk in groups.