[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.