The “Group Effect” comes from the WeChat team’s careful observation of consumer psychology. This in turn also increases the rate of adoption – as more users adopt these features, other users also hop on the bandwagon.” In the article, she wrote, “ the WeChat team pays attention to how a feature may be adopted by a group of users vs. In Y Combinator’s Executive Partner Anu Hariharan’s blog post about WeChat product design, she mentioned that the reason for the substantial growth of WeChat Red Packet derives from the in-depth understanding of the “Group Effect.” Y Combinator is a renowned American business incubator founded in 2005 that assists startups by providing guidelines and advice. WeChat Pay became a key player and game-changer in the mobile payment industry with its bottom-up user-centric design. Go viral Image credit to .įrom the eve of Chinese New Year’s to 4:00 pm of the following day, WeChat Pay accumulated over 5 million users.ĭuring the 9 days of Chinese New Year starting from the Eve to the eighth day, over 8 million Chinese users had received approximately 40 million WeChat Red Packets that contained an average of RMB10 each.ĭuring Chinese New Year in 2015, WeChat Pay Red Packets had grown substantially, hitting a grand total of RMB 1 billion sent.Īs of 2016, Tencent had an average of 6 million active mobile payment users each month, generating over 6 million transactions daily, and has since taken over half of the mobile payment market. It took only 3 weeks for the first version of WeChat Red Packet to be developed, and it was quickly put into internal testing. From a technical standpoint, developing functions like “Snatching the Red Packet” and “Give Red Packet” is not particularly difficult. This demand gave rise to WeChat Red Packet. Some got to thinking: how could this process be streamlined? But due to the huge amount of employees at Tencent, many managers found it troublesome to give out red envelopes one by one. During Chinese New Year, it is a tradition for people to hand out red envelops with cash inside to the children and subordinates at work. The killer feature for WeChat Pay arose out of a simple yet practical user need. When the production team reaches a high level of focus, it only takes something trivial to trigger a great idea. It seemed like pure coincidence and destiny at the same time. The game-changer finally emerged at the beginning of 2014, as Chinese New Year was approaching. However, these strategies didn’t bring about the desired effect. The WeChat team came up with strategies, such as integrating with ridesharing app Didi under the umbrella of its payment functions to boost user adoption. As such, they were not paying any attention to new products.Īlthough WeChat Pay is built into WeChat, which is used by millions every day, users still launched AliPay to make payments and transfer money.Īs an ambitious latecomer, WeChat Pay needed to identify a point of leverage to disrupt the status quo. When WeChat Pay was launched, AliPay users were obsessing over the integrated Yu’ebao feature, also known as the world’s largest money market fund. Compared to AliPay, which has been dominating the mobile payment market for the past ten years, WeChat Pay was tremendously late to the game. On May 8, 2013, WeChat Pay was officially launched. Our work on WeChat Pay’s Lucky Money has inspired us to continue to revolutionize the way that we compete with incumbents. has been authorized to publish this article.īreaking-Point: WeChat Pay Turns the Tables He was previously the product manager of the QQ Synchronized Manager Tool and has participated in joint projects with the WeChat team. This article is excerpted from the book “Tencent’s Product”, by Li Li, who has worked at Tencent for 7 years. Instead, it only requires a focus on a specific scenario based on a bottom-up user-centric design. One lesson we can learn from WeChat’s ascent is that breaking the status quo does not necessarily require a massive and comprehensive solution. Since then, it has successfully taken over half of the mobile payment market, a key segment of the internet industry. In a market dominated by AliPay for over 10 years, WeChat pay managed to outshine AliPay by providing an interactive and personalized money transfer application. WeChat Pay is a notable success case of Tencent. Its product development philosophies have become a prominent example and benchmark of made-in-China success. From its instant messenger apps QQ to WeChat, Tencent Holdings relied on strengths of its products to become one of the world’s top internet companies.
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