WeChat

“Chinese don't buy on websites. There is no e-commerce as we know it. They only buy on their super apps. So on WeChat, Red Note, and Equivalent.”

“I hate super app. I don't, it, no one's gonna be WeChat in the U.S.”

“They have like this AI plus plan they rolled out a couple months ago, where it's really to embed AI throughout the economy and throughout society. And so they're not really focused on As much as sort of getting to AGI and these massive models, they're really m…”

“It's kind of WeChat plus plus, I'd say, is, is the idea for X.”

“And so I didn't have any social media. I didn't make any content. I didn't have a website and have an email. You know, people are just talking to me on WeChat.”

“What's interesting is I do want to point out is Tencent actually has not really been leading in their LLM development at all. In fact, they're the only and first one that have actually integrated Deep Seek into their products into their WeChat, which obviously…”

“Once Tencent integrated Deepseek into their WeChat product, it was like game over for them.”

“People love talking about the, like the super app and we chat, and there was some technical challenges solved by those at scale that were of the same scale of challenges that Facebook was challenged was doing.”

“Apple has huge advantages in the US. They have their moats, which is like messaging, payments, the developer ecosystem. They don't have that in China because of WeChat and these sort of super apps. And so somebody can just trade for a cheaper phone and get lik…”

“I remember one night, a mom in the group posted some information. She said, oh, I went to this harbor called Half Moon Bay. There was a fisherman's market, right? She said, I talked to this fisherman because I really liked the fish, the Pacific black cod. And …”

“So, so first of all, I saw this happening in many different groups, right? Not just this one group. And also, I talked to my friends in other cities in the US. People were doing this in Boston. People were doing this in Seattle. So Chinese immigrants were doin…”

“We, WeChat presents a similar set of issues as well for companies that are using WeChat as a payment tool or communications tool.”

“So, in many ways, Siddhartha WhatsApp in India is the WeChat of China, right? To a large extent, because it's really where we today are conducting our lives, right?”

“In China, for example, like people their COVID codes are used. The red and green zones are often marked as like COVID red, and then they can't travel. Their WeChat doesn't work.”

“WeChat Sort of secret sauce was they introduced audio messages because a lot of Chinese people found the keyboard quite hard to use. And so that's why audio messages sort of took off in the East much more than they did in the West.”

“WeChat actually released voice messages three years before iMessage, like just to give an idea of like how fast they shipped product in their messaging suite. Like iMessage voice messages came three years later.”

“Like it's only about 10 to 15% of their sort of revenue pie is advertisements. Whereas in the West, you're looking at 98 to 99%, especially in the cases of Facebook and whatnot.”

“I think feature facilitating revenue is something that's underrated in the West. Like our sort of business models are kind of either advertisement or subscription, and that's kind of it.”

“I think fiat currencies are the problem. I think cryptocurrencies are the solution for it. And that's why I wanted to build something with a cryptocurrency based wallet in it, because I thought that it would enable instantly anyone from anywhere to pay anyone …”

“And there was a moment three and four years ago when everyone in America was very excited about bots, text bots, and there was this whole narrative, well, that's how WeChat works, and WeChat's got hundreds of millions of users, so this must be a thing. It turn…”

“WeChat launches this business in India and the Indian team keeps saying, we need you to do X and Y and Z. But India is so much smaller and so much less a show of attention. They can never get anyone on the phone in China to make, because the Chinese market is …”

“It's not Facebook can turn the Facebook messenger into a universal account application that subsumes everything else on the store. It's yes, if you were to work out the right way of adding three things to Uber, that might work.”

“Clearly like Facebook tried to copy WeChat and failed completely.”

“If you look at, for example, China, like Tencent invests in so many use cases that are happening on WeChat, because they can't do everything themselves. It's impossible. And it's not in their DNA as well, right?”

“You look at technologies like WeChat, and increasingly American, you're seeing American companies actually copy Chinese companies.”

“In China, what really helped it take off is WeChat made it front and center, a primary way of adding a friend. So as opposed to having to scan for a particular username, because a username is not even required when you set up a WeChat account or knowing their …”

“Mini programs is something that they've launched, which I actually think is totally underappreciated. And you haven't really began to see, you haven't begun to see the power of the mini programs concept in China yet.”

“And there's another, almost like a Siri type product that lives inside WeChat right now. So you can send it an audio message and it will show you a visual response.”

“And actually somebody at WeChat told me that when they tried rolling out mobile payments between people and stores, people were very distrustful of you know, why, why would I send you my payment information on my cell phone that seems so hackable? As soon as t…”

“The red envelopes is a massive enabler for payment information and for group chats. But even aside from that, WeChat also did have hacks. There was a period of time where if you were hailing a taxi, a DD car through WeChat, it was discounted. So they definitel…”

“What excites me about instant apps is it really does eliminate friction for the end consumer, and it also reflects to me that Google understands something that WeChat has known for years, and it's critical to the success of official accounts on WeChat, which i…”

“When WeChat first launched official accounts, a lot of them were more text-based as well with very Simple very simple graphics. They didn't have the menus at the bottom just yet, and a lot of official accounts weren't focused on the WebView concept and the app…”

“If you think about WeChat, it, it's not Fair to classify it as a chat application, and it's not fair to draw all the conclusions that WeChat has achieved and say that all messaging apps can achieve that, because WeChat is much more an operating system. It is m…”

“There is, and has been this meme, which I have nothing to do with and don't think that it's that useful of figuring out what the WeChat of the West is going to be. And it's actually not that interesting of a question.”

“WeChat flourishes because over a third of their users already have their banking credentials tied to their account. And that's why So much commerce can happen with what, just one tap.”

“WeChat has achieved the point that its success is circular, that you have to be on WeChat because everyone's on WeChat. Everyone's on WeChat because everyone's on WeChat. All brands are on it. And Facebook clearly isn't in that position at all. Certainly not o…”

“If you have some kind of partnership with WeChat, that is Almost instant guaranteed success for any startup.”

“I find that less of a hassle than closing out an application, swiping my screen to the next grid of different applications, finding the right one, and then doing whatever I need to do, and then closing that application and going back. So navigating. Yeah, navi…”

“Well, I think one area of app design that's very common in China, but not as seen in the States, is the usage of QR codes and the usage of the scanning feature in any app. And WeChat is actually it's heavily reliant on the scanning feature. So, for example, yo…”

“If you go where people are already talking to their friends, and then you just, like, replicate that mechanic, but you're talking to something other than your friends, and You can go anywhere.”

“Whenever you interact with an official account, that official account can basically take you to something that's similar to a webpage that's just wrapped inside of WeChat.”

“Is WeChat can then basically have you logged into all of these official accounts and also pass on your payment credentials, and so rather than typing in my credit card information every time I'm transacting with a new official account, I only have to link my p…”

“Facebook Messenger, which is probably the closest US analog to WeChat because WeChat in the US is nothing like WeChat in China, which is really interesting, but Facebook Messenger has this payment backbone. They have sort of an app store. It's not quite the sa…”

“It's very difficult to function now in some of the top tier cities without having a WeChat account. When you meet someone, they're not necessarily likely to give you their phone number or their email address, but they will share their WeChat account with you.”

“There are also ten million different official accounts out there, actually more than ten million, and a lot of them are unable to accept payments, and so once you enter in your payments once on the WeChat wallet you can basically use transactions throughout th…”

“Voicemail might not be common in the States, but leaving an audio message on WeChat is super common in China.”

“From the IT side, actually, they even have unique functionality where they can control for confidentiality. They can set it so that you can't forward specific messages. They can tear your access so you only see certain parts of official accounts.”

“So on the moment section when you're posting photos or posting links, they made one decision for functionality that I think is really interesting, which is, if I comment on some photo or anything you posted, only our mutual friends will see my comment, and the…”

“It's really hard to unseat because if you're doing 12 things well and somebody comes along and does, you know, six of those things, even if they do all six better, you're not going to leave the thing that does 12 things well.”

“WeChat since inception has been very developer friendly and very friendly to third parties giving them a lot of flexibility in what kind of features and functionality they want to include, but they also don't charge to create an official account.”

“This is the revenue distribution for Tencent, one of China's most successful consumer internet companies, the makers of the globally famous WeChat. And yet advertising is still less than 20% of their revenues.”

“And so on WeChat moments, your equivalent of your Facebook newsfeed, they've capped the number of ads to just two per day.”

“Tencent's WeChat was created on mobile, and it's probably the most valuable digital asset in the world today.”

“When you're shopping in the supermarket, you use WeChat, a mini program, and you check out as you go. Now it's great. Consumers get this frictionless checkout experience. You don't have to wait in line. That's fantastic. But the real winner is actually Walmart…”

“Right now, you can use WeChat not just to chat with your friends, but to unlock the bicycle next to you, to order food at a restaurant, To book a karaoke bar.”

“WeChat launched its very first official account in April of 2012. Four years later, Mark Zuckerberg launched messaging bots for businesses.”

“In my mind, what makes WeChat mobile first Is that they have completely unshackled themselves from the constraints of designing for a PC, and they utilize features that are mobile-specific, that are specific to mobile hardware.”

“In the New York Times, David Brooks does these annual Sydney Awards, and it was chosen in the 2015 Sydney Awards as one of the best pieces of long-form writing, and the best part is, it was the first time a non-media outlet had been included in it”

“WeChat has over eight hundred million monthly active users. 90 plus percent of them are in China.”

“A third of the people who received this photo shared it on their WeChat news feed. There was a 30% increase And sales for items that were featured in this campaign. And Uniqlo followers went from 400,000 To over a million.”