anuh

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by anuh 9y ago
First, writing stories on Olympic game results required data, and Toutiao pulled it from three sources: [a] real time score updates from the Olympics organization, [b] images from an image-gathering-company it had recently acquired to find
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by anuh 9y ago
Once a question is submitted, the AI engine automatically recommends a list of relevant experts/potential answerers to the questioner to choose from. As a user you can choose who you want answers from. In addition the system also pushe
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by anuh 9y ago
Toutiao is now focused on video as it is increasingly becoming more important (more supply of video content and more consumption as well). Outside of Chinese language centric markets they have an investment in India (which they have announc
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by anuh 9y ago
I can’t convince you to be a believer :) That is totally up to you!
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by anuh 9y ago
I am afraid I cannot do justice to this question by answering it in a few sentences in this forum. Toutiao is one of the first apps in China to enable creators to write content and find audience without having to go through other media outl
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by anuh 9y ago
Engagement alone is not success but sustainable and improving engagement (I.e. strong and improving cohort retention) is a measure of success because it creates a high barrier of exit for you as a user to stop using the app. 74 mins daily i
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by anuh 9y ago
Good point. I believe Toutiao tries to show different content ocassionally to solve the exact problem you are describing. There may be new areas or other hot trending topics especially locally that you may need to be aware of and they use t
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by anuh 9y ago
It is a mobile first app :) I don’t think they want anyone going to their website!
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by anuh 9y ago
Good question. They did not have many social features at the start - especially in year 1 (no followers, no friends, no chat). Over time they added like, dislike, retweet, comments functionality.What made them really stand out in the first
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by anuh 9y ago
Nope. I have known the company from before my time at YC.
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by anuh 9y ago
Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.
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The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King(blog.ycombinator.com)
125 points by anuh 9y ago|71 comments
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by anuh 9y ago
If you have only a small sample size to experiment with then you need to run experiments that can cause dramatic lifts (not minor changes like moving a link, etc.) Because if you have a sample size, then you need to wait much longer to meas
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by anuh 9y ago
Yes. We plan to! There are so many nuances with B2B that we felt it deserved a separate post. Having said that products like Slack (though B2B) is a lot similar to how a consumer app would scale. So it really depends on the type of product
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by anuh 9y ago
Great question. This really has to come top down and starts with the CEO. If the CEO urges the team to focus on the right metrics and asks questions on weekly reports then over time this will be in the DNA of the entire organization. Else i
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by anuh 9y ago
Hi Eveyone, I am Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.
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Growth Guide: How to Set Up, Staff and Scale a Growth Program(blog.ycombinator.com)
95 points by anuh 9y ago|16 comments
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by anuh 9y ago
There were quite a few local Chinese competitors to WeChat when it originally launched. It took them almost a year to surpass Xiaomi's MiTalk user numbers.
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by anuh 9y ago
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
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by anuh 9y ago
Relationships with carriers is not new. WhatsApp negotiated a lot of carrier relationships in India early on. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/10/whatsapps...
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by anuh 9y ago
It is not a monopoly play by any means. Alipay is a big competitor of TencentPay and bigger than WeChatPay. Also though the app supports so many features and services, it has a really simple UI. The user has to go hunt the various features
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by anuh 9y ago
50% of WeChat users use it for 90 mins. Also the team really focuses on user efficiency -I.e.,, completing the task quickly and in the most efficient way
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by anuh 9y ago
That's a fair point! I was also amazed into how much thought went into when to notify and really protecting user experience
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by anuh 9y ago
Yes. Shake and Message in a bottle features were used in that context in the early days.
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by anuh 9y ago
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 pe
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by anuh 9y ago
WeChat had a lot of competition from Chinese mobile-first messaging apps when they started. It was by no means easy for them to scale and drive user growth.
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by anuh 9y ago
Agreed. You could not import QQ contacts and in fact you could only add QQ contacts who were already on WeChat as "friends". So you had to discover WeChat on your own and could not invite a QQ user who had not yet discovered WeCha
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by anuh 9y ago
There was a ton of competition even with mobile messaging before WeChat launched. And the competitors were other Chinese apps.
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by anuh 9y ago
I think we are used to using multiple apps for different services because that is how it started. However if we were used to using one app for everything, things would have been different
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On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat(blog.ycombinator.com)
200 points by anuh 9y ago|145 comments

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