Jiangsu TV-dating show, “Fei Cheng Wu Rao” (非誠勿擾), occasionally gets a foreigner on there for a bit of extra spice. Then Kevin Shimota turned up with his bike and tent. Every single prospective girl ditched him.
Not so fast, ladies. For not long after, Shimota then appeared as Director of Global Marketing and Partnerships for WeChat.
That was 2016, just as WeChat was becoming the world’s first super app. And now Shimota has written a book about his 4 years with the online behemoth, entitled “The First Super App; Inside China’s WeChat and the New Digital Revolution”.
As readers will discover, with WeChat, the user experience is king. Nothing else matters. Not even money. Scale is what it’s all about, and a bunch of other things, such as the unique nature of the Chinese internet. But scale is where it’s at, and without it, WeChat could not power the myriad of capabilities it has. And as a result, monetise.
The Nanjinger received a pre-release copy of the book and was delighted to be granted a Zoom meeting with the author. Turns out the Seattle, USA, native, who now lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and dog, is a delight with whom to converse.
In his book, find out about how the traditional World Wide Web worked out to be insufficient for China, internet diversity (re. Uber & Didi), stuff like “positive network externality” and the rules and value on which WeChat prides itself.
The big question, of course, is did they have any idea that WeChat was going to be as big as it is today?
Shimota recalls it was clear WeChat was going to be a hit early on and it was going to change a lot of things. He also revealed that while the head of WeChat is on one level very humble, freely admitting he knows nothing about how to make an app for the rest of the world, he’s also arrogant on another, virtually saying, “‘No one can tell me how to make a product in China. I know how to do that’. … He’s very confident in his product management skills”.
Moving on to the second part of The Nanjinger’s chat with Shimota, in which we fielded him questions submitted by some of our alert readers. The answers to select questions are paraphrased below for brevity (the author really, really likes to talk and we ran over our allotted interview time by a wide margin.) Sorry, but we simply don’t have the column inches.
Q: When does WeChat make money when I use it to buy something?
It doesn’t directly, but that helps to put WeChat in a postion where it can make money. But if we click on an ad and then buy something, then yes.
Q: How does censorship work?
A: It falls under “Security”, just as pornography and violence does. Some posts and images get flagged, and there’s really not much else to it. No conspiracies there.
Q: How many people work for WeChat?
A: WeChat is more or less located in a (large) back office at Tencent. During Shimota’s tenure, only about 1,000 people worked at WeChat. He figures it’s probably 2,000 today (that, obviously, is literally nothing for something that boasts as many users and financial transactions as it does). Unbelievably impressive stuff.
The First Super App (ISBN 978-988-8769-42-1; 212 pages), published by Earnshaw Books, is available from the publisher and on Amazon.
