Old Piece, Reposted: My Observations on WeChat

Jiang Wu · 2025-03-01

*Originally published in Chinese on March 1, 2025, as a repost of an earlier piece.*

This is an older piece that I reposted. The companies in it are startups that built on WeChat, and all of them are Chinese.

WeChat freed the model

Ruijian Times: WeChat freed an existing model, releasing it from the constraints of the traditional one.

Chinese internet has a great many niche communities in BBS form, and a new generation of service businesses draws people in through communities but is limited by the BBS format. Ruijian Times was the first to drop the BBS form. Relying on the fragmented time and mobile habits WeChat offers, it built a new kind of vertical community on WeChat and made a large step in product and technical liberation, leaving room for imagination in many fields. WeChat is more than a place for marketing and customer service. A new world can be built through it.

WeChat retires the terminal and creates an all-purpose terminal and IoT system

Yidiancai: WeChat plus a smartphone is an all-purpose terminal.

After technology changes, traditional service businesses brought smart terminals into the service flow. Whether ordering by iPad or by a person, the terminal carried a great deal of service value and was the carrier of information. Yidiancai built an ordering system on WeChat in which WeChat replaces human interaction, making ordering simpler and more efficient. That turns the smartphone into a new all-purpose terminal, the next one, and possibly the basis of an ubiquitous Internet of Things built on smartphones.

Doing better on the WeChat platform: app innovation on the WeChat "operating system"

Treat WeChat as an operating system, develop new apps on it, and deliver new services.

Ziruke: life services move onto WeChat. As WeChat succeeded in occupying people's mobile lives, it also built a new operating system, and nearly every service tried something inside it, offering services based on WeChat. Ziruke is a service account under Ziroom, a Chinese rental housing company. It connects its user system to WeChat's and puts services such as booking cleaning and repairs on the WeChat platform. Through WeChat, users can check the progress of repairs, cleaning, and complaints, rate the repair and cleaning service, and pay rent online.

Linjia Doctor: a vertical service moves onto WeChat. It is an internet startup in a medical specialty. It organizes a team of star specialist physicians and gives patients a platform to connect directly with specialists, along with a complete treatment plan based on each patient's situation. Using WeChat's messaging, it set up an online clinic. From WeChat, patients can upload their materials, the doctor gets a first understanding of the condition and, after an initial judgment, tells the patient whether treatment is needed. If it is, the doctor discusses the follow-up treatment plan with the patient. Linjia Doctor also makes post-operative follow-up, drug information lookups, and revisit appointments easy.

Asynchronous communication plus multimedia equals a new commercial space

Yishuodian: a new commercial space based on WeChat's multimedia messages. In an age of highly digitized information, text communication is very limited, and richer multimedia means a far larger space to explore. Yishuodian makes full use of WeChat-based asynchronous communication and the traits of multimedia messages, embedding language learning in WeChat and combining it with teaching to get asynchronous interaction. What it represents goes beyond an attempt to put language learning on the WeChat system. It points to the new commercial space contained in WeChat's multimedia messages.

More intelligent recommendations: data in, service out

Zhengjia Parking Assistant: data as a service. Zhengjia, a shopping mall, uses WeChat as a channel for data services and combines WeChat with users' personal information: data goes in and the matching service comes out. With the Zhengjia Parking Assistant you can see from home how many spaces are left in the whole plaza. After parking, you can check your car and a parking-time reminder in real time through WeChat, apply a parking discount to your WeChat membership card after shopping, and pay the parking fee with WeChat Pay.

Turing Robot: a personalized robot that can live in WeChat. It is a second-generation open platform for intelligent robots, using machine learning, knowledge graphs, and pattern recognition to build its own systems for intelligent Q&A chat, semantic understanding for smart life services, and personalized knowledge bases.

The Turing Robot platform, built on natural language processing, knowledge bases, and cloud computing, gives developers and partners a range of intelligent semantic-processing services, including semantic understanding, intelligent Q&A, and knowledge-base integration. To date the platform has accumulated nearly ten billion corpus entries and GB-scale base data, and in tests its overall accuracy has reached above 90%. On the WeChat platform it can provide users with intelligent, personalized robot services.

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