“2016 WeChat Open Class Pro Version” took place in Guangzhou on Jan.11th. Xiaolong Zhang, the Senior Executive Vice President and President of Weixin Group at Tencent made his first public speech to more than 25,000 audiences at present. Being one of the founding fathers of WeChat, Xiaolong Zhang shared four key values of WeChat, and one the new product WeChat is developing.

Xiaolong Zhang during Speech

New Feature on WeChat: “App Account”

Xiaolong Zhang revealed the idea of WeChat’s latest product during the end of the speech: “App Account”. Nowadays, a lot of WeChat’s public accounts look just like a media platform. But Zhang thought that WeChat public account should be more than media account: it should be a platform that provides services.

Xiaolong is confident with App Account’s future, since both WeChat users and startup companies will benefit from the new feature. “Applications that are not used frequently need not be downloaded any more. In addition, the service is beneficial for startups as it can significantly lower the cost of building up a business as launching an HTML 5 site is cheaper than launching a functional application,” he said.

4 Key Values of WeChat

Based on his thoughts on WeChat, Xiaolong Zhang shared four key values of WeChat as follows:

1. “Everything should be based on user’s value.”

According to Zhang, WeChat user’s value should be the No.1 thing. “Everyone knows how important users are, but most people are just saying it”, Xiaolong said. He thought that user value is the key to differentiate from a good product and a bad product.

In terms of platform, Zhang hoped WeChat platform to offer infinite possibilities for 3rd party to develop, instead of one-on-one corporation, which sometimes seems worthless to users. “To not push anything that users won’t need to users” will be their priority.

2. “Creativity will show WeChat’s value.”

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com once said that “It’s more important to be kind than clever”, and this quote was widely spread in WeChat team internally. To Xiaolong Zhang and WeChat, deceiving users could generate page views for a while, but after all it’s bad for users. WeChat is aiming to help public accounts with creative and helpful contents, since those really matter to users.

3. “A good product is a good product that user use it and leave it”

You may never hear this before, but Xiaolong claims that this would be a key value for WeChat’s product. Instead of users spending lots of time on WeChat, Xiaolong rather prefer users to finish their task with higher efficiency in WeChat loop.

4. “Commercialization should go imperceptible”

Xiaolong Zhang claimed that good product and good user value are not contradictable, thus he hoped WeChat commercialization to be as imperceptible as possible. “For instance, Last year WeChat gave out a lot of coupons to users, while more than 90% have not been redeemed or used, which seems not to be a good solution.”Zhang also mentioned that WeChat is developing a new type of coupon for WeChat eCommerce based on social relationships.

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