[abalone]

> 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...

I've always wondered if WeChat benefitted from something particular to the Chinese context, for example, favorable government support.[1] This is not exactly the sort of stellar investigative methodology that's going to answer that question. In fact the article makes it sounds like it's all general business and design principles, yet fails to address why WeChat's success is specific to China.

[1] "A successful stunt during last year’s celebration of Chinese New Year’s Eve saw CCTV, the official state broadcaster, offer millions of dollars in cash rewards to WeChat users who shook their phones on cue." http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703428-chinas-wecha...

[anuh]

I think WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code - both of which failed in the US. These two features were critical to support so many use cases that WeChat enables today (payments, peer to peer transfers, offline to online service). Yes the Chinese New Year helped garner interest and a lot of people use WeChat to send red packets, they also connected their bank accounts and started using it for payments. This is again in line with how WeChat launches every feature. They try to launch it in groups rather than getting each individual user to try it separately.

[rahimnathwani]

"WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code"

WeChat was successful (in DAU/MAU) way before WeChat payments existed. WeChat payments couldn't have succeeded without the existing user base.

[anuh]

Before they turned on red packets they had only 300M MAUs. They do claim that red packets was a critical growth lever for them for new users

[seanmcdirmid]

They failed in the US because the US has excellent credit card coverage while china (having lots of small scale retailers) does not. It was the right feature at the right time in the right place.

[LiweiZ]

Driven by qq number, it preserved real social network since around 2000 or earlier across basically all age groups. Its competitors in mobile age tried to break into the market with sex/business/name card/phone number/whatever else relationship graph and nothing could beat the real one. Also the main force among urban hipsters, MSN, decided to leave the game, which led its users to fall back to what they used back in college (QQ). QQ users were laughed at by urban hipsters for being too rustic. So the missing piece of the network came back.

Being part of ruling party's operation unit is something to be proud of. And business can get onto the fast lane. I have to say this is the only business model to get strong and big in that market. Of course, you have to have some foundation to get into the short list.