Tianji, China’s Biggest Professional Social Network, is Growing Fast

In the wake of LinkedIn’s monster IPO, all eyes are on professional social networks, and in China, there’s none bigger than Tianji. I spoke with Derek Ling, the CEO and co-founder of Tianji, amidst the madness of TechCrunch’s Disrupt Beijing to learn more about the company and their future plans.

If you were reading carefully, you’ve already seen Tianji’s cool infographic illustrating their explosive growth. At the beginning of this year, they were picking up 100,000 new users a month — which is already pretty amazing — but they’ve grown exponentially since then and as of now they’re clocking 380,000 new users per month, and that number continues to grow.

According to Mr. Ling, the biggest obstacle to the site’s growth right now is actually the size of the team. The site currently has over eight million users — putting it way ahead of LinkedIn in China, which only has one million — but at the beginning of the year, the Tianji team was just thirty strong. Now, they’re at 80 and planning to hit 100 by the end of the year.

But Mr. Ling stressed they’re being careful to hire good people, and not overextend themselves as many of their competitors have. Tianji was founded in 2005, and they’ve seen over thirty competitors emerge in China. All of them have since failed, and Ling said most of them failed because they over-extended themselves, over-hiring and burning through cash rather than doing what Tianji has been doing: keeping the team small and focusing on building a locally-focused and high-quality user base.

To do that, Ling said they’ve tailored their site to local tastes in ways that even LinkedIn has yet to match. First of all, they’ve been in Chinese since their inception — an obvious advantage, to be sure — but they have also embraced the demands of the Chinese market in more subtle ways. For example, Ling noted, Chinese professionals prefer to do business after becoming friends. LinkedIn’s search-based model for finding new connections simply doesn’t appeal to many Chinese professionals because they don’t like to talk business until they’ve met someone and formed a relationship with them.

Tianji has a search feature, of course — “no one uses it,” Ling laughed — but it focuses on helping users expand their networks through discussion forums and groups where they can be introduced via mutual connections or build relationships based on common interests.

Mr. Ling and Viadeo, the European professional SNS conglomerate which Tianji is now a part of, feel that Tianji is entering a crucial period. By keeping their team small, they’ve been able to exist and build a real userbase gradually since their founding in 2005 without worrying about muddying the waters with monetization. But now, as explosive user growth proves Chinese professionals are finally looking for an SNS that offers them value beyond sharing and gaming, Ling’s team is expanding. They’re currently hiring staff for three teams to monetize the site: advertising, job recruiting, and MBA training programs.

Ling compares the current growth to LinkedIn’s explosive growth in 2007-2008, saying he thinks that China is 4-5 years behind the US when it comes to interest in professional social networks. And certainly, Tianji’s remarkable numbers appear to back up his claims. 380,000 new users per month and that number is still growing every month? That’s ridiculous!

Dan Serfaty from Viadeo also sat down with us to explain that ever since Viadeo started making a profit in 2009 (Tianji joined Viadeo in 2008), they’ve been taking the profits from Europe and investing them in developing regions, including China and India. With Tianji on the verge of exploding, it seems those efforts have paid off.

At the moment, Tianji is focused on expanding, and the increased interest in professional social networking sites has meant that they’re now able to recruit talent from the top names in the Chinese net scene — companies like Sina and Tencent — to add strength to their team. Dan and Derek said they’re not interested in selling the company, but they do see an IPO sometime in the future.

Don’t hold your breath, though. With growth as fast as it is now, they’re considering an IPO in the next “12-24 months”, but clearly it’s not right around the corner. “But at the end of the day the natural exit for a company like us is IPO,” said Dan.

Advice for Start-ups

As an experienced start-up founder, Derek Ling also spoke with us about founding a start-up in China, and offered a few pearls of wisdom for anyone considering a China start-up.

There’s never been a better time to start-up, he said, but in a sense there’s never been a worse time, either. A small team can work on an app very easily with no user acquisition costs, and they have readily available distribution platforms of all sorts to help test the waters. At the same time, though, it’s much tougher these days for students and other first-timers to really compete if they’re looking to create a new platform because there are so many experienced teams out there with more money and more expertise looking to do the same thing.