What You Don't Know About China's Leading Internet Companies: WeChat (Part 1)
Within 2 years of its launch, the number of WeChat users reached 300 million. However, such a software was born in a precarious manner.
Something to know before reading
WeChat, owned by Chinese company Tencent, is China’s most popular social media app. The app covers more than just communication, including the exchange of contact information by way of a QR code, making a doctor’s appointment, or controlling a bank account. It is estimated that WeChat is used by 90% of the Chinese population and is one of the primary ways for Chinese and foreign businesses to build a customer base. (Source)
Tencent QQ and QQ Mail: two other major products of Tencent before WeChat. QQ is an instant messaging software service and QQ Mail is its associated email platform. (Source1, Source2)
Pony Ma or Huateng Ma, is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Tencent. (Source)
Allen Zhang or Xiaolong Zhang, known as “Father of WeChat”, led the developments of WeChat and Foxmail. (Source) (CrunchBase Profile)
Let’s start the journey.
Days Before Tencent
Years ago, Li Xueling, who was still a reporter, wrote: "As long as you stand at the intersection of Beijing’s HuangZhuang street and yell, I am Foxmail Zhang Xiaolong, a large group of people will come around and ask you for a signature."
This is how well-known Allen Zhang was. At that time, Tencent had not yet been established. However, there are rumors that Allen Zhang once received an email from a user and he was surprised by a small mistake. The writer introduced himself, "My name is Pony, and I am running a site."
It was three years before Tencent was born, and eight years before Pony Ma bought Foxmail. There is no sign that there is too much contact between Allen Zhang and Tencent.
Foxmail was later acquired by Broad International Internet Company for 12 million yuan, and Allen Zhang was also appointed as Broad's Chief Technology Officer. In 2005, Foxmail was acquired by Tencent, and Allen Zhang and his team also got acquired. These two changes can be considered to be the two most important changes in his life trajectory.
Allen Zhang in Tencent Before WeChat
Before the launch of WeChat, Allen Zhang's position within Tencent had always been expressed in two ways:
The first one can be described as "can’t be higher". Those who hold these views have cited many examples: Allen Zhang did not want to go to the Shenzhen headquarters after joining Tencent, so Pony Ma set up Tencent Guangzhou Research Institute for him, although the distance between the two cities is only Two hours; Allen Zhang was unwilling to go to Shenzhen to hold a regular meeting, so Pony Ma sent his own car to pick him up; in the year and a half of transforming the QQ mailbox, Pony Ma and Allen Zhang’s team exchanged more than 1,300 emails...
The second statement seems to be completely the opposite. Those who hold these views said that Pony Ma really respected Allen Zhang personally, but Allen Zhang’s position within Tencent was not that important before the rise of WeChat; Guangzhou Research Institute was very famous, but there were very few people working there: its size was only a tenths compared with Tencent’s development team of tens of thousands of people. For a long time, the address of Guangzhou Research Institute was often not found in the recipient list in the important emails the headquarters sent out. "Tencent Biography" said: "In Tencent, Allen Zhang’s fame mainly came from two aspects: He was the champion of a tennis match in the company games and he was one of the largest consumers of KENT cigarettes in Guangzhou."
In fact, these two statements are not wrong, but they are not entirely correct either.
Pony Ma attached great importance to Allen Zhang and established the Guangzhou Research Institute for him. However, it is true that Allen Zhang’s status before the birth of WeChat was not prominent. So the most important misunderstanding may be that Allen Zhang himself did not feel embarrassed about this. He was obsessed with technology and products, he was a tech person, and he didn’t care what other people cared about. Generally speaking, before WeChat was born, he was happy with Tencent.
How WeChat Was Born
You may wonder, how did Allen Zhang's team, which mainly focused on the mailbox business, incubated such an game-changing product in Tencent like WeChat?
According to Allen Zhang himself, he wrote an email to Pony and started the WeChat project. This thing is true, but there are also many untrue rumors, such as he went to a temple before working on it:). Thinking of that email, said that sometimes he felt a little scared. Because if he did not send this email that night, instead he went to play pool, maybe there is no WeChat, or another team from the company may create another WeChat.
There is a key part in this description: “another WeChat made by another team of the company”. In fact, this sentence can be expressed as "or another WeChat made by any company."
Because, in terms of product nature and main features, WeChat is not the first mature Instant Messaging tool on the mobile. Before and after the birth of WeChat, there have been a series of products with similar functions such as Mi Talk, kik, talkbox, etc. Among them, kik is crucial to the inspiration of WeChat, and even the inspiration of kik to Mi Chat is also crucial. On October 19, 2010, kik was listed in the App Store. Its function was extremely simple: based on the user’s mobile phone address book, it could directly chat with contacts via free text messages. It did not support sending voices, pictures, and files though. The innovation was based on people’s address book to establish relationships and using SMS for free. Kik added 1.5 million users in just 15 days. Less than two months later, on December 10, 2010, Mi Talk released the Android version and on December 23 the iPhone version.
What was Allen Zhang doing during the two months that Mi Talk was released? "Tencent Biography" recorded a WeChat message by Allen Zhang on November 19, 2010 , which was 20 days before the release of Mi Talk: "My only expectation for iPhone 5 is that, like iPad (3g), it does not support cellular phone functions. That way, I can pay less on cellular fee, but you can use kik to text me, use google voice to call me, and Facetime to video with me.” In face, shortly after kik was released, Allen Zhang sent an email to Pony Ma, suggesting that the Guangzhou team, which is exactly the same mailbox team, make a product similar to kik, and Pony Ma agreed.
On January 21, 2011, WeChat was launched, and that lonely blue planet picture began to appear on people's mobile phones.
Relationship Between WeChat And QQ Mail
According to Lu Shushen, one of the earliest employees of WeChat, all the success of WeChat is based on the success and failure of QQ mailbox.
As mentioned earlier, when Allen Zhang saw the success of kik and suggested Pony Ma do WeChat, one of the products he was working on was an app called "Hand Post", which was the mobile version of QQ mailbox. This team temporarily turned to the development of instant messaging tools. In order to quickly implement the first version, it reused the entire back-end protocol and framework of the original QQ mailbox as much as possible, so the communication protocol behind it was also the HTTP of the mailbox protocol, instead of the UDP protocol used by the usual instant messaging tools. So every time we send a WeChat message, we are really sending a micro-mail to a friend through the WeChat backend.
QQ Mail provides subscriptions and has extended the "reading space" function (which has been offline), but they look like the predecessors of WeChat official accounts because subscribing to some blogs or friends’ QQ spaces via email is just like following the official accounts of some media and celebrities in WeChat.
The QQ mailbox also used to have a function to chat with QQ friends in the mailbox. This feature was later moved into WeChat and became the "QQ Offline Message Assistant." There are many similar examples. It doesn't matter what plug-in is made, what functionalities have been re-used, what's important is that this shows Allen Zhang's unique insights into product.
As a programmer from the PC era, Allen Zhang always has a systematic thinking. He thinks WeChat as a system, so the infrastructure layer and interface must be well-designed. This later became the core competitiveness of WeChat. When we think in a systematic way, adding new functions is as convenient as people installing a software or app. In comparison, for developers who only have an application design’s perspective, adding a new function every time means new features or upgrades must be written again. That will be much slowly.
Leading WeChat Team
One of the biggest reason why WeChat was able to grow quickly later was Allen Zhang’s team. Of course Tencent has provided much operation and maintenance support, but the team that Allen Zhang has trained in the past five years is even more critical. Five years ago, this team had never done wireless development and mobile development. The mobile terminal is used for web pages and front-ends, so it is directly transferred to it. How could it be so fast if Allen Zhang didn't have a good foundation for the team?
Looking back, Allen Zhang was not involved in the Tencent core team for five years from 2005 to 2010, at least he was not in a very important position. But he is a strong person. He doesn't follow trends at any time. He has always worked hard. It doesn't matter if he is considered as important personally, he will seize the time to polish the mail team. Then came WeChat.
From this perspective, all the roads you have traveled are not useless.
Before WeChat’s Success
Although the development basis of the mailbox has provided a lot of convenience, the market reaction has been mediocre after the launch of WeChat version 1.0. At that time, everyone loved Mi Talk more. Mi Talk was launched earlier than WeChat, and was also operated by the client master Lei Jun, and the interface was also simple and beautiful. More importantly, Mi Talk had everything WeChat did.
Allen Zhang said that the main attraction of kik and Mi Talk was to provide free text messaging, and Chinese users already had various telecom packages, so they can use text messages for almost free. Therefore, the attractiveness of free text messages is really not big enough for them. With this market response with WeChat 1.0, many people suggested to Allen Zhang use Tencent's huge resources, or at least use the promotion resources of QQ mailboxes to bring some volume to WeChat. These suggestions were rejected by Allen Zhang. He told his colleagues that if a software did not demonstrate the ability to grow on its own with its own attractiveness for virality, then promotion will mess up the situation. On the contrary, in the absence of promotion, product managers can better observe WeChat to see what functions can be the dividing line for users' spontaneous promotion. This is very valuable for understanding what is done right and what is ineffective.
To some extent, this reflects Allen Zhang’s calmness and non-KPI-oriented characteristics, which is a kind of forbearance and patience that can accomplish great things, like WeChat’s success. This will be illustrated in the next chapter.
What’s Next
In Part 2, we will talk about WeChat’s critical moments in its success. Thanks for reading and stay tuned.
Reference:
Ma Huateng and Tencent: A Biography of One of China's Greatest Entrepreneurs (Amazon)