Why did WeChat succeed in China where other apps failed?

Pedestals not to scale – WeChat would be much higher. Image credit: TiA

When Tencent first launched WeChat back in January, 2011, nobody predicted that the bare-bones, mobile-only messenger was just five years away from being an ecommerce and social media juggernaut with well over half a billion users.

The last half decade saw China’s former social media giants get used to living in WeChat’s shade. Renren, “China’s Facebook,” has seen its valuation crumble to a fifth of its 2013 high as users flocked to more feature-rich apps. And Weibo, while hardly obscure, has long since been eclipsed by WeChat’s gargantuan user base.

What lessons can be learned from WeChat’s rise? To find out, we need to roll the clock back to the stone age year of 2010, when messaging apps were novelties in a world of SMS texts.

From Kik to king

WeChat today is such a unique, innovative platform that it’s easy to forget that it was originally framed to be China’s answer to Kik. According to a New York Times piece from a few years ago, Tencent R&D head Allen Zhang formed the first WeChat development team after being “inspired by Kik messenger, which he worried might eventually threaten Tencent’s dominant, PC-based QQ instant messenger.”

Companies failed to see that China was the biggest battleground in the mobile revolution.

The first version of WeChat was released in early 2011, right into the midst of a messaging app revolution. As mobile users grew bored and frustrated by the limitations of SMS, a new kind of app began sprouting throughout the world.

Kik, WhatsApp, and Viber were all launched in 2010, and the next year saw WeChat, Line, and Facebook Messenger roll onto the global stage. In China, a nascent Xiaomi launched Miliao, while many Chinese internet users logged into Twitter-esque Weibo for more than just commenting on the news.

“WeChat had competition when it launched. [But] Weibo just wasn’t very good at interpersonal communication, so it left a giant hole,” says William Bao Bean, managing director of Chinaccelerator and partner at SOS Ventures.

Whichever app managed to exploit that hole in China and grab a hefty market share in 2011 and 2012 would become the incumbent.

WeChat was able to outflank its domestic competition by rolling out in-demand features on an insane schedule. Within one year, the app had expanded from its simple text/voice/picture offerings to include video messaging, a “shake” feature to find nearby users (which doubled as one of China’s early answers to Tinder), and more.

If that wasn’t enough of a leg-up over the local competition like Xiaomi and small startups, WeChat was also able to leverage Tencent’s massive QQ user base. While other services required email addresses or phone numbers to login, WeChat simply needed a QQ account – which hundreds of millions of Chinese people already had.

Toe the Line

Next stop: the world