Musical.ly's Alex Zhu on Igniting Viral Growth and Building a User Community | #ProductSF

In this new land, you have to build a centralized economy in the early days. This means that wealth distribution is accruing to a small percentage of people in your land. You make sure they successfully build an audience and wealth. This makes them role models for the country (and platform). You effectively create the American dream. People in Euro... See more

1. **If you want to build a new user-generated content platform or social network then the content has to be *extremely* light. The content creation AND consumption need to happen within seconds, not minutes.**

2. Education is a little bit against human nature. If you look at how people use their phone, the majority of people are using their phone to communicate and entertain (play games, using social media, or messaging).

4. **For a new social platform to take off, your early adopters need to be young.** Especially teenagers in the U.S. — why? They have a lot of time and they are creative. They are already digitally native. If your product can attract a small group of these users, they will talk about it in school and on social media — you won't need to spend as muc... See more

In 2013, Alex was a futurist for education in SAP. Tried to do some research on how the education industry was going to transform with new technology. This prompted Alex to start a company in the education space. Alex and his co-founder came up with a "billion dollar" startup idea to transform education by combining Coursera + Twitter into a new pr... See more

3. **It's pretty hard for a new startup to try to change human nature. It's better to follow the human nature than to fight against it.**

We have to stay really close to our users. We call it participatory design. We talk to hundreds of users on WeChat constantly. We have daily conversations. Not only about product, but also to understand what they think and what they like in pop culture. We need to be immersed into the American teen culture. We always share our wireframes with these... See more

The first thing that users seek when they join a social media platform is fame. However, once they have the fame — it's not enough. They need to monetize. If the platform is a platform that can generate the most revenue for influencers, then they will stick around.

However, you have to decentralize the economy at the same time. Having an American dream is good, but if it's only a dream — people will wake up eventually. You need to give the opportunity to the average person. You have to decentralize your traffic model. Give all users satisfaction in creating content and create a middle class.