On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
1. Allen Zhang (Founder of WeChat) was the author of once popular desktop email client: Foxmail, and later Tencent acquired it, Zhang refactored a new version of web mail on mail.qq.com.
In order to support Microsoft Exchange protocol, Zhang and his team reversed engineered it, this was later the foundation of Wechat's binary protocol design, in Zhang's words, it's magnitudes faster and robust than your XMPP copycat. It's designed to work well in extremely poor signal coverage area with only GPRS 2G online access.
2. Wechant literally stole telecom's SMS cake. Tencent put lots of effort striking deals with telecoms, ordinary IM startups might simply be blocked or QoS'd to death.
3. Tecent also pushed very hard to third-party Android ROM publishers to pre-install Wechat. It's like 2-5 RMB per new user acquisition and the app can not be deleted unless rooted. Tecent also negotiated to made sure Wechat app always stays in memory and can not be easily killed so push messages can be received, Be noted, because Google was fully stripped in all legit Android phones in China, there's no Google Play or GCM service, some other IM competitors are struggling to have basic message receiving capabilities.
4. Wechat is a lock-in mega app. Little known fact is it got a Tecent Browser (X5) fully builtin, it's an outdated Chromium build and its behavior is kinda headache to debug compared to othe mobile browsers like Chrome or Mobile Safari, lots of customised JS bridges and restrictions.
The evil part is that every link you view in wechat must renders exclusively in X5. E.g. if you open a youtube page, it renders in webview in wechat, if you have youtube app installed and wanna view the URL link in app, you have to click for the wechat menu, open the webpage in system browser, so your waste your data bandwidth for the second time and opens the exact webpage, and click "Open in App".
This ensures engagement times.
5. Wechat blocks competitor URLs for obvious reasons, e.g. *.taobao.com domain since day 1 because "the link looks malicious and may harm your device". It force users to choose Tencent equivalents(JingDong).
I get that a partnered article won't cover these kinds of practices. However it does leave a bad taste in my mouth to see this unapologetic praise in the article for what seems to be a monolithic monopoly play.
I lived in China since beginning of growth of WeChat and could see it in front of my eyes, in beginning it was very simple messenger and they kept growing userbase and adding more and more functionality, though you end up being locked in in their ecosystem, as was mentioned taobao links are blocked and those options under Wallet section are mostly not the best value, so I pretty much avoided those added functionality. Heck I rather top up electricity through Alipay, since it was easier than WeChat or some companies didn't have contracts with them.
anyway back to your comment, you say they are ahead of Whatsapp and Facebook, but please tell me in what exactly they are ahead, in selling tickets, paying utilities and sending money through messenger app? do people outside China desire this? if people don't desire it, they are not ahead, people in west have fast wire transfers, can pay pretty much anywhere in card so there is no necessity for such functionality, I could go on and on if you tell me in what area they are exactly ahead since I lived in China for years and I live in west so I can compare
Yes, WeChat is extremely convenient for life in China. Is it convenient and good app for life outside China? Hell no, I don't want and I don't need those features from Messenger, since we don't have blocked internet I can visit whatever website I want and use their services without state protectionism.
This is what amazes me. WeChat has lots and lots of features, but doesn't feel heavy at all. The messaging UI is both clean (no unnecessary clutter; snappy) and feature-rich (can send text, start a voice chat, send money, send a voice message). Some of the other features that you might not use every day (like paying utility bills, topping up mobile) are in a separate 'Wallet' section which actually looks a bit like the Alipay app.
Amongst WeChat's many local competitors were equivalent messaging apps including China Mobile's "Feixin" messaging app and China Telecom/Netease's "Yixin". Both competitors, as officially published apps from the telcos themselves, had the ability to leverage free SMS messaging, an ability that WeChat did not have access to. WeChat is considered a tangential competitor to the telcos.
WeChat doesn't block or QoS other IM products. That would be illegal and, frankly, a PR fiasco in addition to a great way to lose user trust.
3) It's against WeChat values to push mobile phone makers, distributors, or ROM publishers to preinstall WeChat for pay. In addition to being against WeChat values, it's also a big hassle as preinstalls require careful version management. Due to the popularity of the app and the relatively high cost of data for many low-end users, many of these distributors have voluntarily preinstalled certain popular apps including WeChat as a convenience to their consumers. WeChat did not "negotiate" to keep WeChat app in memory -- I'm not sure where you're information comes from. For users within China where Google Cloud Messaging is not an option, a background process for Android continues running to receive push notifications from a notifications server. WeChat works with various partners including "phone security" apps to make sure that this background process isn't being unnecessarily killed by an overly aggressive memory manager process which would result in not receiving notifications. Outside of China, WeChat uses GCM for push notifications for Android devices. This is a common requirement for apps within China since GCM is not available, but because some apps have lower engagement they are more likely to have their notifications background process killed by aggressive memory managers.
4) WeChat for Android uses the X5 kernel, a branch of Webkit (not Chromium) and largely initially used because certain security vulnerabilities on older versions of Android system browsers (including things like SSL-vulnerabilities) made it impossible to safely deploy properly encrypted communications and transactions in webviews without making sure there a secure web rendering kernel.
iOS versions of WeChat, of course, use the default in-app Safari for webviews because it's considered secure.
5) WeChat blocks certain URLs from appearing in webviews because a) they contain malicious code and are unsafe to users or b) too many fraudsters were using certain domains to host spammy marketing content and would leverage WeChat to spam out links to these pages to make money or c) local legal requirements require blocking of certain content.
I understand that it's sometimes difficult to get good information on a product that's very popular in China, but not in Western markets. That's why it's so valuable that the YC team has spent their time to help other founders understand some of the underlying dynamics for WeChat's successful product strategy. Misinformation, therefore, is not valuable in helping the YC team achieve this goal.
What I mean, telecoms might block IM service because SMS market were rapidly replaced by IM apps. It was highly disputed around 2012. Wechat generates so much traffic that their poor 2.5G cell network can not handle signal storms.
Not only that, Wechat had VoIP capability, which requires a high level license to operate in China. The whole OTT controversy can be found here https://www.zhihu.com/question/20847225
> WeChat works with various partners including "phone security" apps to make sure that this background process isn't being unnecessarily killed
Exactly what I meant, Tencent was large enough to negotiate, while other smaller IM brands were not so lucky. Wechat's success was standing on a giant's shoulder.
> because certain security vulnerabilities on older versions of Android system browsers
But newer versions of android Wechat still refuse to include system default browser as webview even if it's more up-to-date and safer, no?
Being rich and influential takes you to places for sure and since Tencent was actually powerful and had their own IM like GTalk, they had the skills and the presence for this. But we have to appreciate that they were not restrictive to their cash cow, they disrupted themselves and moved forward to create/acquire wechat
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 were originally designed to be used by the Chinese government. Even though these features might not yet be enabled for WeChat users in countries outside of China, there is very little stopping an authoritarian government in a different state with widespread WeChat adoption from making use of these features if they just negotiated the right deals with TenCent, instantly gaining unprecedented powers in shaping private communications of its citizens, which can be an exceptionally powerful tool in detecting and quelling dissent.
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.
This was one of the sentiments raised in Nathan's talk, and the aim of the talk was not to just aimlessly bash and scapegoat China and WeChat, but rather to suggest taking a hard look at ourselves and the choices we're making in terms of becoming complacent to or outright enabling authoritarianism, because there's a frightening number of parallels that can be drawn between China and WeChat and the US government and US tech corporations.
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.
People use paytm for paying bills, the taxman's website to pay taxes, amazon for online shopping, don't think wechat has the power/influence/differentiating product in India.
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 tasks WeChat can help with in a day)."
100 times this. I can't think of a single large Western consumer software company who can actually think like that.
It has become a commonplace that WeChat is incredible, and everyone over here wants to build it. But solving that problem is hard. Really hard.
The user experience of WeChat is clearly great, but that level of centralization really wouldn't fly over here.
Many people, including me, use *.google.com as a one-stop shop for all their software needs.
By expanding their platforms into other tasks that other people already know how to do better, do competitively, and have a greater mindshare of.
It's possible for two different environments with two different sets of ideals to exist without either one being "more right".
only people amazed by wechat are those who never lived in China
next time - Democratic party would like to repeat success of CCP, they get 100% of votes! same goes for railways, all companies in liberalized European market are crying tears and wanna go learn from Chinese state monopoly railways how to win the market
/s
I don't feel this is particularly novel, though perhaps it is to software companies (I don't know, honestly). But this idea feels a lot like "Market Penetration" as defined in the context of the Ansoff Matrix (introduced in 1957): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansoff_Matrix
It's Marketing 101 stuff, and lots of big corporations, in old industries, employ this approach.
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.
> use the app an average of 50+ minutes, and 9 to 11 separate times, per day2. To put that in context, it is the same as the “combined time” users spend across a portfolio of Facebook apps
But annoyed that mot western coverage of the app focuses on the breadth of features/platform stuff and belies the many ways that it's an extremely solid messaging app compared to many.
The choices made in the fundamentals (adding friends, creating groups, notifications) are all super well thought out. People using it will use it for communicating with strangers and conducting business, something you don't see in any messaging app in the US. The core messaging features are versatile and ultilitarian. And it's chock full of power user features like tags, notes, pinning threads, etc. The core team had spent 10 years working on email clients and services before embarking on it and it shows. This is the foundation the rest was built on.
I would love to talk to you about it!
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 fact the article makes it sounds like it's all general business and design principles, yet fails to address why WeChat's success is specific to China.
[1] "A successful stunt during last year’s celebration of Chinese New Year’s Eve saw CCTV, the official state broadcaster, offer millions of dollars in cash rewards to WeChat users who shook their phones on cue." http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703428-chinas-wecha...
WeChat was successful (in DAU/MAU) way before WeChat payments existed. WeChat payments couldn't have succeeded without the existing user base.
Being part of ruling party's operation unit is something to be proud of. And business can get onto the fast lane. I have to say this is the only business model to get strong and big in that market. Of course, you have to have some foundation to get into the short list.
This is not meant to be snarky or biased. Considering the control China has on citizen communication (eg the great firewall), what guarantee does anyone using the app have that all data isn't being fed through the Chinese version of the NSA?
Also: how much of the growth can be attributed to less competition in the Chinese app market?
That innovation is starting to spill into India with Chinese company investments. A year ago, mobile payments in small shops and businesses were ubiquitous only in China, now they're proliferating in Indian cities too.
The Western markets are quite tame in comparison.
Still a good point, just because they don't have Signal or Facebook (not that I'd trust it) doesn't mean they don't have strong competition in their own field of approved apps.
If WeChat is indeed so overwhelmingly dominant in people's lives in China, what strategies do the startups there use to compete with WeChat's core offerings like chat, social networking, payments, and to what degrees of success? Or do startups their just accept WeChat as a piece of infrastructure and try to innovate by building things on top of their platform instead of competing against them directly?
A group chat for all employees, a group-per-team, ad-hoc groups for ad-hoc teams. It is assumed to be faster (people check more regularly) than email, less formal, more direct. And the boss can see everything (given they're in the group). Great for teams that want to look busy. I dislike it, as looking busy is different from being busy, but this is a large part of the mainland China work-ethic.
For international companies, megacorps in particular, it is not used officially, but still often gets used, with a disturbing amount of client-specific information leaking that the head-office would strictly discipline should they know, but they don't.
To edit: This was always possible before with QQ, and QQ does have phone apps, but QQ didn't have this casual business-use to the extent WeChat does today.
tl;dr Chinese assistant of a German newspaper was arrested for political signalling on WeChat.
This is a tool that has almost certainly been used to find and kill people in lower-profile cases. It's disgusting to see that HN/SV people will never care about that part of tech. This thread makes me feel terrible.
> At the time, Tencent’s products had ~650M monthly active Instant Messenger accounts.
Lesson 1: Start with 650m active users
This is probably due to the high level of competition and limited marketshare the firms in China are looking at. FB and Western firms want to rule the world, because they can, so they are still focusing on growth with iniciatives like internet.org. Chinese firms know their market is China, and they understand China, and it will be hard for them to export, so when they grow as big as WeChat the options are more limited.
Their option was to build a whole ecosystem around it that could capture maximum user value. They also seem to prize their users religiously, which is great for them. But it might not have happened for them that way either if they were hopeful of capturing the entire world.
It requires you to bind your account with a debit card. I am using WeChat for years but I never attach my debit card to it, because I do not have a China debit card. When I need e-money, I just ask my family or give my friends some cash and they transfer e-money to me. That's all. Then I can use the e-money for offline shopping, online shopping, sending Hongbao (as gift-card). I do not understand why debit card is required.
This is mandatory when you ask for an online banking account.
All you do is enter the number on your bank card, they text you a code, you enter the code and the payment or linking of the account is confirmed.
Nowadays most people have already linked their accounts with bank. But you still do not have to. When the feature first released in 2014, most people used the e-money for social purposes like sending gift cards and transferring small amount of cash; people just did not withdraw money.
That's one of the most important reasons why WeChat won tens of millions e-money users in a very short period.
For Alipay, it was already solved when I moved to China in 2010.
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 example, but reading more examples would be helpful in understanding, which is why I ask.
- 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 on to services (like FB or Google log on)
- Share (real time) location with other people.
- Translate text (Chinese <-> english) (Life saver for me)
There were days when you would seriously just use WeChat, no other apps except maybe Baidu and AliPay.
Anyway, there are more features I'm sure, these are just the ones I remember using.
This is the real reason that we can't do this on phones in the West.
After moving to California from Beijing, I can do all those things easily now online. What wechat offered instead was he Chinese preference for having everything in one place and getting around weaknesses in infrastructure. It isn't intrinsically better than what we have in the west, just different and suited for china.
I'd find it hard, in California, to do any of these things:
- Send a small payment to a friend (sure, Venmo, but most of my friends don't have Venmo)
- Buy movie tickets and choose a seat
- Pay in a restaurant without risk of my card being cloned
- Pay a water or electricity bill
- Share (real time) location with other people (yes, 'Find my friends' works if we're on iOS, but now everyone is, and it has major setup friction, and no concept of temporary sharing or groups)
- Chinese wife buys movie tickets online all the time, chooses seat if the theater has reserved seating.
- credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.
- online, on autopay.
- iPhone has had that feature for forever.
Try it. It's hard due to fragmentation.
- Chinese wife buys movie tickets online all the time, chooses seat if the theater has reserved seating.
Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone. - credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.
In theory, yes, it's on the merchant. In practice, it's a whole lot of hassle if your mag stripe card gets skimmed.
- online, on autopay.
Autopay isn't online. Unless you mean your computer or phone has to be on, or the autopay doesn't work.
- iPhone has had that feature for forever.
Doesn't work if even a single member of the group uses Android (or Windows or BB), which is pretty likely in a group of more than 4 people.
I've never needed to give any money.
> Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone.
There are literally tons of apps for this. It isn't hard at all. Heck, just use fandango and be done with it, if you want.
> - credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit cards in the states accordingly.
> In theory, yes, it's on the merchant. In practice, it's a whole lot of hassle if your mag stripe card gets skimmed.
Fuck ICBC. Chinese restaurants in Bellevue would pray on Microsoft China employees just because they knew they could scam their credit cards while, when reported to ICBC, would just say "prove you didn't make those charges!" Whereas if it was a non-Chinese AmEx, it wouldn't be a problem at all. Just fuck ICBC, and WePay is a Chinese solution to a Chinese problem.
> Autopay isn't online. Unless you mean your computer or phone has to be on, or the autopay doesn't work.
My gas bill, electric bill, and water bill were just paid a week ago, I didn't have to do anything. EVERY utility has an online presence, and they all support autopay. My rent is on autopay also, as is my car loan, all setup online, the only bills I pay manually are my credit card ones and whatever I get from the hospital, again, paid all online.
> Doesn't work if even a single member of the group uses Android (or Windows or BB), which is pretty likely in a group of more than 4 people.
There are plenty of location services if you don't want to use what is built into iPhone. Note that the iPhone map service works even in China, as my wife had me on it a lot when we lived in Beijing.
You've missed, or are ignoring, my point: in China, if I want to share my location with a bunch of friends, I can do it almost instantly. Just add them to a WeChat group and make two taps.
With a group of friends in the US, I can't, because there's no single app/service that they're all using, that has that feature.
Also:
- Card skimming isn't a uniquely "Chinese problem".)
- The fact that you're comparing mobile utility bill payment in China, with autopay in the US, suggests to me you haven't tried mobile bill payment in China.
- You are right about Fandango - it appears their mobile app has offered seat selection in many theatres for at least a couple of year.
Fandango has been around for many years.
We just moved to the USA from Beijing. We have pretty much everything we had back in china without wechat.
That is more or less what Travis Kalanick explained to the driver Kamel their decision to introduce UberX after UberBlack during that controversial video shot in an Uber ride 2 month ago.[1]
[1]: https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14766964/video-uber-travis-...
Nice & inspiring.
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.
I'm not making a judgment on that - I'm just saying that it might not be applicable to all startups.
Seriously. you can message, voice chat, call, video call, order plane tickets, split bills, order stuff online, buy movie tickets, pay utility bills, share photo's like FB timewall, create publics chatrooms, pay in physical stores and so much more.
That app was ridiculous. Miles ahead of even the biggest dream of any app-central company in the Western world. They built up an entire ecosystem in one app.
Obviously, it drained a lot of battery on Android. But Android itself is miles behind iOS anyway, since there is no Google in China and Android today is pretty much an empty shell without GPlay Services / Framework.
...All of that is handled within the app's runtime? (I would find it incredibly surprising if it did not hand off at least some of those to the phone layer.)
Or if it is - I would be surprised if what you describe doesn't already exist there.
You can make utilities payment via WeChat, but I would much prefer to have a platform automate this for me and not part of an IM.
The West has been following the UNIX philosophy of doing 1 thing and does it very well.
Perhaps WeChat is not just an app, but an eco-system. As for UX on strictly IM functionality, I would prefer WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram etc as it is much "lean" and lightweight to use.
I personally don't think WeChat can be successfully replicate their model to everywhere in the world.
However, a lesson to learn for everyone (including WeChat), build local product. Builds product that fits everyone's need accommodating their culture and lifestyle.
I really think Google could have created the ultimate chat app... but I guess they are "creating their own competition."
Not strictly true. You can log in a second device (e.g. web browser, tablet client, desktop client) by scanning a QR code with your primary device.
My iPad is my secondary device. Not all messages are synced, but I can pick up my iPad to start or continue a conversation or do other stuff, without doing anything special. The full conversation history is only on my phone, though. The iPad only has the messages sent/received whilst I was actively using it.
Unlike many other apps who concentrate on serving young people, business people or colleagues, WeChat is the ultimate solution for me to talk with my classmates, my parents or even a courier who I just meet 3-minutes ago. This makes it stand out from just an app working above the operating system, but a common solution people on mobile just like phone call or messages. This makes WeChat special.
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.
you can do pretty much all user car scenarios of what by opening google.com and gmail let's say (and i am saying this as someone who doesn't like Google ecosystem)
the thing is meant if things which wechat does are pain in the ass to do in China, not so much in West, so there is no need for us to integrate it, for instance card payments are widespread in West, not do much in China so they came with online payments with QR codes, same goes for paying utilities, just open internet banking of your Bank and pay, it will be probably faster than paying within wechat
i am telling you this as someone who lived in China for years and used all these services
heck even within China i was pretty much using only for chatting, wall and small money transfers
for sure not for buying plane tickets, Cinema tickets, paying utilities, etc., even for most of those there are cheaper options than their promoted partner, but yeah if you are dumb or lazy and dunno how to use internet them i can see how is wechat appealling
I guess Wechat either sidesteps it by having everything be a 'profile' effectively just making it a chat app interfacing to other apps? Or maybe apple doesn't care about that restriction over there...?
this is amazing way of thinking around the problem
yeah, if someone is looking up to privy like this I would recommend moving to China or North Korea where they can try to release their another inspirited product
Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've been posting plenty of unsubstantive and/or uncivil comments to Hacker News. We penalize accounts that do that and eventually ban them if they won't stop. Please (re-)read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
not sure what is not civil about my comments, I lived in China, I talk about Chinese app mentioned in article and provide what is behind real success of WeChat, which is not thanks to features they have, but thanks to government protection
But yeah, most of HN readers saw China only online and see how is it booming and stuff like that. Like look at amazing Beijing subway with many new modern nice and dandy lines, somehow everyone fail to see they are still at 50% level compared to any western city (in west you have roughly one line per 500K served population, in amazing Beijing 1mil sharing one line with no suburban trains or trams to supplement it). Same goes for their amazing HSR - omit the fact they stole German and Japanese technology, omit the fact their prices are more expensive than faster and more convenient flying in Europe and that they closed most of cheaper slower lines, so end result for people is to pay significantly more to get home.
Chinese gov propaganda department must be smiling reading comments on this website.
Inflammatory comments on divisive topics are destructive of what we care about on HN. So as a topic gets more divisive, comments need to get more civil and substantive.