Saved by Tom Bonin
What are WeChat Mini-Programs? A Simple Introduction
WeChat’s early tweaks and optimizations were just the beginning. It soon pioneered an innovative “app-within-an-app” model that changed the way media outlets and advertisers used social platforms.
Kai-Fu Lee • AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
Despite hundreds of features, the navigation bar at the bottom of the WeChat screen is four icons: Chat, Contacts, Discover, Me. Zhang: “I told the team to establish a rule that WeChat shall always have a four-icon bar, and never add anything to it.”
Patricia Mou • vol.33: 15 Mindful Product Principles from Allen Zhang, Father of WeChat
It was a social and commercial transformation that was powered by—and which further empowered—WeChat. Installed on more than half of all smartphones in China and now linked to many users’ bank accounts, WeChat had the power to nudge hundreds of millions of Chinese into O2O purchases and to pick winners among the competing startups. WeChat Wallet li
... See moreKai-Fu Lee • AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
In the first 5 months of WeChat, the team didn’t promote it themselves. Instead, they waited to see if users would be attracted to WeChat and then promote it themselves.... See more
If users weren’t willing to do this, whatever marketing they did would be meaningless. Although it took more time, it meant that the product was healthy when it really started to g
Patricia Mou • vol.33: 15 Mindful Product Principles from Allen Zhang, Father of WeChat
Underneath this transformation lay several key building blocks: mobile-first internet users, WeChat’s role as the national super-app, and mobile payments that transformed every smartphone into a digital wallet.
Kai-Fu Lee • AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
In the span of two years, WeChat went from a no-name app to a powerhouse of messaging, media, marketing, and gaming. But Tencent wanted even more. It already monopolized users’ digital lives, but it wanted to extend that functionality beyond the smartphone. Over the ensuing five years, Tencent painstakingly built WeChat into the world’s first super
... See moreKai-Fu Lee • AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
These Wechat buying groups have enabled a group of community-entrepreneurs to have profitable side hustles through knowing how to create and maintain a chat group.
Lillian Li • The hottest and least understood e-commerce model: Community Group Buying
Shortly after its founding in 2010, WeChat started letting you shake your phone to randomly connect with other users. You could also write a digital “message in a bottle” and send it to a random WeChat user in the hopes they’d respond.