Taking a cue from Magic, WeChat gets a personal assistant

Shortly after Magic appeared out of thin air in February, startups around the world rushed to copy the on-demand concierge concept.

In China, one new startup is eschewing Magic’s reliance on SMS – so last century! – in favor of WeChat. They’ve come up with WeSecretary.

But rather than going after the sizable Chinese middle class among WeChat’s more than half a billion monthly active users, the fledgling business is only in English, targeted at expats in China.

Language barriers

Daniel Worlton, WeSecretary co-founder, tells Tech in Asia that the tiny team won’t be able to compete against the inevitable flood of Magic-style apps, so they’d rather focus on serving a niche area.

Apart from individual expats in China, the WeSecretary crew has eyes on business visitors as well as large companies in the country that have a number of foreign executives or engineers.

No SMS needed – WeSecretary is found inside WeChat.

To make use of the on-demand helper, someone just needs to add the WeSecretary account within WeChat and then begin chatting with them. At the other end is a real human who speaks English and is keen to help. Worlton anticipates it being used for things like finding a repairman, buying stuff on Taobao, or setting up an account in Alipay – all things where an expat would run into language barriers or other layers of confusion.

“It can give people independence,” Worlton says, so that they don’t need to press on Chinese workmates, friends, or partners to do things made more complex by a language barrier.

On-demand

Worlton reckons Beijing has enough foreigners – about 70,000 – to give the service some traction before expanding to a few other cities. Even though WeChat is a rather China-centric messaging app in terms of where its users are based, he believes it’s the right choice for the startup rather than SMS, particularly as it has solid versions in English and numerous other languages. “If you plan to stay here a while, you can’t help but be sucked into the Chinese landscape,” he says.

“We have a serious advantage over competitors because we are piggybacking on WeChat instead of developing an independent app that users will have to download – and stick in a folder somewhere and never use,” he adds.

Not that WeSecretary has close competitors at the moment, as Chinese Magic-esque apps are inevitably going after local customers. One of the most-promising of these is Shen Zhu, which translates as “Divine Pig”. Yes, that is a fantastic name. It’s a standalone app for iOS and Android. The startup behind it has received seed funding.