WeChat launched in January of 2011 as a simple messaging and photo sharing app. This team of only seven engineers went on to create the first version of WeChat in just three months. Tencent made a bold decision: it put together a small skunkworks team from the QQ Mail team, its core product at the time, to a new mobile app that could potentially compete with other product teams from other divisions within Tencent. Recognizing the growing importance of mobile, the company created a mobile version of QQ in 2008, but the app was weighted down by desktop-centric features (e.g., multiple user statuses, large file transfers, embedded services such as music streaming, etc.) back then. At the time, Tencent’s products had ~650M 4 monthly active Instant Messenger accounts. Many Chinese people grew up using Tencent’s QQ, a popular desktop messaging app (similar to ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger). Tencent was already one of China’s top internet companies in 2010, and the biggest social company even before WeChat was launched.
Tencent Started WeChat (mobile-first messenger) as a side project, and it ended up reinventing messaging in China. Unlike AOL and Yahoo, Tencent is one of the few companies to have evolved its messaging product portfolio successfully from a web/desktop product to a mobile/messaging platform. This post dives into the growth strategy that led to key WeChat milestones, lessons learned and gives insight into the method behind the madness as WeChat scaled from 0 to 800M+ MAUs in less than 6 years. To put that in context, it is the same as the “combined time” users spend across a portfolio of Facebook apps, including Instagram, Facebook and Facebook messenger, on a daily basis 3. 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 to use the app an average of 50+ minutes, and 9 to 11 separate times, per day 2. And while WeChat’s blazing success has been concentrated in China, everyone in the Western world has experienced WeChat’s work, as the service has inspired a new category of “messaging as a platform.” You don’t have to look hard to see hints of WeChat in other messaging platforms such as Apple’s iMessage or Facebook’s Messenger platform. The WeChat platform has completely evolved the way Chinese people communicate and socialize online, and it has also changed the way they pay each other and pay for their groceries. It dominates the Chinese mobile market with 889 million monthly active users 1. My friend and former colleague Connie Chan described WeChat as “ the one app to rule them all”. Founders are increasingly pointing to Asia when asked for an example of a product they aspire to create, and WeChat is very often that aspirational product.
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