Why are there more and more popular apps, but their popularity is getting shorter and shorter?

Changba, Moman Camera, Crazy Guess Picture, Face Meng, Surround the Nervous Cat, Wumi, Zuji ... There are more and more popular apps, but the duration of their popularity seems to be getting shorter and shorter. Are they really gone, or will they make a comeback?

The mobile application field is becoming more and more like a red ocean. However, there are always some people who try to swim to the other side. Right now, Xiaokaxiu , an app owned by Miaopai that imitates the German short video app Dubsmash, is creating a wave of lip-syncing imitation shows on Weibo, among which several imitation videos of actress Jiang Xin have been forwarded more than 200,000 times.

Despite the experience of Miaopai and the success of Dubsmash, Xiaokaxiu still makes the Miaopai team excited. "The results that were originally planned to be achieved in half a year were accomplished in just one month," co-founder and senior vice president Lei Tao told Caijing Tianxia Weekly. On May 13, Xiaokaxiu was launched on the Apple Store, and on July 26, it topped the free rankings, with more than 1 million downloads in a single day.

Lei Tao is not too worried about how long Xiaokaxiu will be popular. "It's like influenza, which is contagious and breaks out quickly, but people will also quickly develop antibodies. Users who come here to watch the fun will leave sooner or later, and we satisfy users who really have needs."

In fact, similar applications have been emerging since 2012. The popularization of mobile Internet has created a new term - "phenomenal application". These types of applications have become extremely popular through social networks such as Weibo and WeChat. According to incomplete statistics from Caijing Tianxia Weekly, these include at least Changba, Moman Camera, Baidu Magic Photo, You Draw and Guess, Crazy Guess Picture, Face Meng, Surround the Nervous Cat, Wumi, Zuji, Xiaoou and other applications.

Overnight, it seemed as if everyone was using them to process their own lives - changing their WeChat profile picture to a picture from Moman Camera or Face Meng, singing karaoke online with Changba, or using Zuji to add sentimental text to photos in Moments. However, after a period of time, many "phenomena" disappeared.

Yes, they were popular, but it was only a "short-lived" trend.

"Nowadays, the communication network is so developed that viral transmission can be like DNA replication, which can arouse users' interest in an instant, but this interest may disappear all of a sudden." Cheng Yu, partner of Morningside Capital, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly, "It is possible to go crazy overnight, or it is possible to fall overnight. Companies must be prepared for the long term."

Exponential explosion

"By the time I found that people outside the Internet circle were also using it, things had already exceeded my expectations and I couldn't stop it." Yang Liu, CEO of Zuji, reviewed the days when Zuji became popular to a reporter from Caijing Tianxia Weekly. At first, when Yang Liu saw Internet-related people in her circle of friends using Zuji, she thought they were testing the product.

The main function of Zuji is to process pictures. It can process pictures into wide screen and add subtitles to make pictures look like blockbuster movies. On June 12, 2014, Zuji 1.0 was launched on the Apple App Store. After that, like most apps, the number of users grew slowly, reaching 100,000 on March 9, 2015.

But after the number of users exceeded 100,000, Zuji suddenly began to show exponential explosive growth: 1 million on March 14; 7 million on March 19; 12 million on March 24... After more than a month, users' enthusiasm gradually cooled down.

Recruiting engineers, round A financing, and media interviews all came along with the growth in the number of users, and Yang Liu couldn't even find time to wash her hair. At that time, Zuji had only 8 employees. "In order to keep the basic functions running, we had to downgrade the service. The originally planned revisions and optimizations were not done in time, and all our energy was focused on plugging loopholes." Yang Liu admitted that she had not anticipated the sudden outbreak of Zuji, and was not prepared for it. But she also said, "When it comes to starting a business , you will never be fully prepared. Although it is painful, it is also beautiful."

The R&D team of Crazy Picture Guessing is even smaller, with only 4 people. This is a small project of Haoteng Technology. On May 13, 2013, this mobile app was launched on the Apple App Store . Starting from May 29, the number of users began to grow rapidly. On June 7, the number of new users reached 300,000 in one day, making it the number one on Apple’s free app list in China. Within 3 months, the total number of downloads of this app exceeded 100 million times.

Hao Teng Technology CEO Cao Xiaogang told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that the purpose of doing Crazy Picture Guessing is to bring about a good communication effect through the interaction in the circle of friends. In the end, the communication effect produced by this small team of four people was something that had never been achieved by Hao Teng's nearly 100 employees before.

In May 2013, Guo Lie, born in the 1990s, established the MT team. In November, Faceu 1.0 was launched on the Apple App Store. In June 2014, Faceu began to experience explosive growth, with daily downloads reaching 5 million, ranking first on the Apple App Store's overall rankings in 17 countries including China, the United Kingdom, and Spain.

The one who took the "exponential explosion" phenomenon to its extreme was surrounding the nervous cat. In July 2014, this H5-based game took only three days from development to being all over the screen, and received over 100 million visits.

But after experiencing explosive growth, these apps all encountered the same problems as Zuji. Due to the small size of the team and insufficient initial preparation, the backend services began to face serious challenges. "It was good enough that I could maintain the backend well. At that time, I couldn't even find time to recruit people and conduct interviews." said Huang Guangming, co-founder of Moman Camera.

After users' enthusiasm for use declined, the development team chose to return to the product. Guo Lie began to refuse interviews. He wrote on his WeChat Moments : “I don’t want to turn the company into a tourist attraction. If it’s really for our own good, please don’t disturb us while we’re working.”

Xiaoou, an app that can directly use the mobile phone camera to shoot 3D cartoon characters, unexpectedly became popular in overseas markets after it was launched on the Apple Store. Statistics from app tracking and analysis tool App Annie show that Xiaoou ranks first on the Apple App Store free list in 37 countries including the United States, and is in the top 100 in 124 countries. However, Xiaoou founder Chen Junhong expressed his concerns, "The global epidemic is just an accident, something we don't want to happen. Exposing it too early will only make us passive. We don't want to be seen as an app that becomes popular inexplicably and then disappears."

The “tipping point” of “explosive products”

If you pay close attention to these applications, you will find that they have some common characteristics: they are novel and interesting, easy to operate, can highlight the user's personality, and can be shared on social networks, thereby attracting more user participation.

For example, Baidu Magic Photo's PK celebrity function can satisfy ordinary users' desire to compare themselves with celebrities, and sharing it on WeChat Moments can trigger complaints or praises, which can also give them a sense of satisfaction. You can create your own cartoon image through Faceu, or process photos with Moman Camera, which meets the user's needs for customized personalized image and creative face collage.

As Kevin Werbach, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out in "Gamified Thinking: The Power of Changing Business," some common elements in games, such as winning and losing, scoring, and rewards, make games more fun and easier to attract players.

In Werbach's view, Nike+ used gamification thinking - users can compare their personal data with other users' data and intuitively see their progress in running - to spread rapidly. In 2013, after Nike+ was launched on the Apple App Store, a running craze swept across the country, and people rushed to share Nike+ pictures containing their running mileage and routes on their Moments.

In addition to these common characteristics, two other factors played a key role: timing and opinion leaders.

"The key is timing." On May 31, 2012, Changba was launched on the Apple App Store, and five days later it topped the free list. CEO Chen Hua later concluded: The popularity of Changba was the result of many factors, the most important of which was the time when China's mobile Internet was becoming popular. "Everyone is rapidly changing their phones from feature phones to smartphones. At this time, users have an extremely strong demand for new and fun applications."

Data from the China Academy of Telecommunication Research of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that China's smartphone shipments reached 118 million units in 2011, a year-on-year increase of 175%, exceeding the total of all previous years. From 2011 to 2013, smartphone users were looking for all kinds of interesting apps. Apps such as Changba, Moman Camera, and Crazy Picture Guessing have exploded in popularity during this period.

The gap in the market provides dividends for App developers . Cheetah Mobile CEO Fu Sheng mentioned that in 2012 he began to study the US app market and discovered that one of the top five apps in the Google Play Store was actually developed by an individual developer in Heilongjiang.

Lei Tao, co-founder of Miaopai, believes that the explosion of Miaopai benefited from the timing of the popularization of 4G networks. In 2014, 4G networks and 4G smartphones became rapidly popular, and WeChat also began to add short video functions to the Moments. Short video apps such as Meipai and Miaopai quickly entered the public eye. In March 2014, Meipai became the most downloaded app in Hong Kong, Macau and other regions just one day after it was launched on the Apple App Store. By May 2014, the number of Meipai users exceeded 100 million.

"This usually occurs in the early stages of a platform's birth, and entertainment and functional applications must appear before actual life applications. Everyone is looking for fun things - small games, basic tools, but life-related and e-commerce applications are not so easy to become popular." Chen Hua believes so.

The contrast between Xiaoou's performance in overseas markets and in the Chinese market may better reflect the impact of these factors.

When Xiaoou was released in August 2014, it was named "3D Big Head Show" and was soon changed to "Xiaoou". In February 2015, Xiaoou entered the US Apple Store rankings for the first time. On April 5, Xiaoou made an update and adjusted the app category from social to entertainment. Less than 20 days later, Xiaoou jumped from outside the top 1,000 in the entertainment category to the top of the US Apple Store's free list.

But in China, Xiaoou's performance is worse than in many other countries. During the Chinese New Year, Xiaoou ranked first on the free list of the Chinese Apple Store because of its animated New Year greetings feature, but soon slipped out of the top 1,000. With the update on April 5, Xiaoou's ranking began to climb again, but it was only around 20th place.

Comparing the performance of Xiaoou and Lianmeng, two apps with cartoon characters as their main function, in the Chinese app market, we can find that Lianmeng, which mainly uses pictures, has benefited from the spread of WeChat avatars among Chinese users; while Xiaoou mainly uses videos and is very suitable for American social networks, such as Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, etc., which have video social functions. China's video social networking is much weaker.

"This form does fit certain points and is a relatively easy way of expression." The point Yang Liu was referring to was the way of expression through pictures. Before Zuji, photo social networking sites such as Instagram and Nice have been helping users develop the habit of sharing photos. At the D11 conference in 2013, Internet Queen Mary Meeker pointed out that the total number of photos shared by netizens every day exceeds 500 million. It is not difficult to see that image applications have become an important part of the Internet.

Yang Liu later concluded that the spread of Zuji followed a certain trajectory: the first people to try it out were friends around him, some of whom were practitioners related to photography and film, so Zuji spread among this group of people. Because they have the advantage of photography, the pictures they take are of high quality and therefore easy to spread. The photography and film community itself has a certain influence and will affect some celebrities and experts. This group of people, as "opinion leaders" in daily life, eventually leads to more and more ordinary people following them.

The role of “performative” users

Huang Guangming, co-founder of Moman Camera, remembers that after Moman Camera was put on Tencent App Store in June 2013, 25 users downloaded it on the first day, more than 170 on the second day, more than 400 on the third day, and over 1,000 on the fourth day. After that, for a short period of time, the daily download volume remained at six or seven thousand.

At that time, Huang Guangming told his employees that he would treat everyone to a meal when the number of user downloads exceeded 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 500,000, and 1 million. Huang Guangming predicts that in three months, Moman Camera will become an application with millions of users, and reach 30 million by the end of 2013.

"We didn't promote it at all, it was completely spontaneous word of mouth. But later, after a photographer used the software and shared it, the number of views suddenly exceeded 10,000 that day, and then it exploded." In August 2013, Huang Guangming treated his colleagues to a meal. "At that time, we wanted to achieve 1 million in three months, but we achieved it in one month." By September, Moman Camera no longer counted downloads but only looked at the number of activated users. "The download volume is no longer of any reference value. The number of activated users has exceeded 100,000."

Obviously, the photographer played the role of "opinion leader". Communication scholar Lazarfield believes that "opinion leaders" are "active elements" in interpersonal communication networks who often provide information to others and exert influence on others. They play an important intermediary or filtering role in the formation of mass communication effects, forming a two-level transmission of information.

The design of Changba fully takes into account the role of "opinion leaders". "Changba is actually a well-thought-out product. Before we started, we considered how to attract users, how to make users excited, and how to further promote it," said Chen Hua, CEO of Changba. He divided the path of Changba attracting users and then spreading the word into three stages.

"What attracts users is essentially a tool. We provide the best karaoke tool. Our music library is very large, the sound modification is very good, and all the songs are free. This tool attribute has attracted a large number of users who like to sing. This is the first wave of users."

After the first batch of users finished singing, Changba would display that they "beat X% of users nationwide" and show buttons for sharing on social networks such as Weibo and WeChat. "This can easily excite users. They can share it on their Moments, Weibo, and pull their friends in." Changba also provides a ranking function. The more flowers you receive, the higher your ranking. "Originally, you sing and your friends think you sing well, so they send you flowers and push you to the last place in a small city. Since you are already in last place, you want to get to the first place. At this time, you will compulsorily share your work with all your friends and ask everyone to come up and send you flowers. This is the second wave of communication." When a person has become a small star in a singing bar, he or she will have his or her own fame and fans. Strangers who like him will call on their friends to vote for him, thus forming the third wave of dissemination.

"Changba attracts a steady stream of users through a set of product systems, forming our own more interesting singing and chart-topping ecosystem," said Chen Hua. Obviously, users who sing, share and vote on the charts are the core users of Changba.

"We call this type of user a 'performative user.'" Lei Tao, co-founder of Miaopai, believes that "performative users" play a key role in the process of sharing and dissemination.

"Performance users" may be users like Jiang Xin who are willing to show off their talents and make fun of themselves, or they may be users with a strong competitive spirit - when they see friends sharing their creativity or game results, they can't help but want to surpass them. This type of users are not only super fans of these apps, but also play the role of "opinion leaders" in their dissemination. In the early stage of promotion, Xiaokaxiu also deliberately selected some "performance-type users" for cooperation.

It doesn't feel so hot anymore

"Do you feel that although Changba was so popular back then, it is not as popular now as it was back then?" Fresh Media CEO Ji Zhongzhan asked Chen Hua this question during the video recording of "Entrepreneurial Molecule". Ji Zhongzhan believes that Changba missed certain possibilities, such as Changba could become a star-making platform, because even Faye Wong was releasing her own singing audios on Changba at that time.

"Not as popular as before" is a problem encountered by every app that has ever become popular. Baidu Index (a statistical analysis platform based on Baidu's Internet user behavior data, reflecting the search volume of a certain keyword in Baidu, its rise and fall trends over a period of time, and related changes in news and public opinion) shows that these application-related indexes will fall from tens of thousands of points to a few thousand or even less than a thousand in about a month.

Wang Shiying, vice president of Linekong Interactive, believes that the game apps that have become popular on WeChat Moments are mainly light games for leisure and entertainment. A common feature of this type of game is its simple functions. However, simplicity itself means that it is easy to get tired of the game and it is easy to be copied.

In addition, among these applications, games and social software account for the majority, including Faceu, Surround the Nervous Cat, 2048, Wumi, etc. Their rapid explosion and decline are closely related to the attributes of game products.

Wang Shiying pointed out that for most games, it usually takes one to two months for the number of users to increase significantly and reach a peak after they are launched, and then they begin to decline. According to data from Linekong Interactive, the general next-day retention rate is 50%, and the final user retention rate of a good game is 30%.

When the user base reaches a certain size, the growth rate will inevitably slow down. "After becoming larger in size, it is very difficult to continue growing," said Chen Hua, CEO of Changba. "If you just invent a new way of playing, people will find it novel at first, but after playing for a while they may find it boring and get tired of it." Chen Hua believes that Changba solves people's existing demand for karaoke, and applications that solve existing needs in real life will have a relatively longer lifespan.

Guo Lie admitted that Faceu does have the problem of insufficient user stickiness, after all, users rarely change their profile pictures.

Suffering from being imitated by other applications, Zuji applied for a patent to the Patent Office, but was told that it would take six months to two years to apply for a patent. This speed is too slow for the Internet industry.

Crazy Picture Guessing has not been updated since December 28, 2013. Haoteng Technology CEO Cao Xiaogang said that there are only a few users who are still using Crazy Guess Picture, and this product will basically not be updated, "but we plan to launch Crazy Guess Picture 2, and the gameplay will be changed."

Surround the Nervous Cat is an HTML game with a short life cycle. From the developer's perspective, as long as the dissemination effect is achieved, its decline is expected.

"Whether something lasts long depends on whether it is an activity or a product. There is a big difference between products and activities," said Huang Guangming, co-founder of Moman Camera. "When an activity, such as a party, ends, people go away. But a product has the value of continued use."

Wan Haoji, partner of Matrix Partners China, has a similar view: "If it is just a way of playing, it may become a standard feature of a certain product. But a small gadget that is very popular for a moment may no longer exist after half a year. It cannot survive independently because it does not solve the problem, it only solves a way of playing."

Without prejudice, it is not a circle of friends

"Do you still see people sharing Didi Kuaidi coupons on WeChat? Very rarely. But in fact, the number of users of Didi Kuaidi is increasing." When faced with the issue of "the perception of a decline in users", Miaopai co-founder Lei Tao cited the example of Didi Kuaidi. He called the phenomenon that people think an app is declining because the frequency of seeing it appear less frequently in their Moments "Moments bias."

"In fact, the total number of downloads is getting bigger and bigger. It's just that it may have exploded in a media circle or a white-collar circle first, and everyone saw a point. In fact, the number of users accumulated over a long period of time is very scary." Chen Hua said that the daily download volume of Changba is still maintained at 200,000-400,000.

In mid-2013, because people around them no longer talked about Momo, many people thought that "Momo was no longer viable." At that time, Momo CEO Tang Yan said to Caijing Tianxia Weekly, "Who said Momo is going to die? You think the number of Momo users is decreasing, but in fact it is increasing. Domestic media people, especially those in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, have too international a vision. You don’t understand many situations and your views are wrong." More than a year later, Momo was listed on the Nasdaq.

The contrast between the silence in the circle of friends and the increase in downloads is also the growth process of a mature user. Lei Tao, co-founder of Miaopai, said that mature users usually learn about an application through social networks and eventually settle on this application platform.

"Most users' dependence on a certain application cannot be reflected in social networks," said Wang Shiying of Linekong Interactive. This is exactly the same as hardcore games. Communication between veteran players may be concentrated in a forum or community rather than social networks such as WeChat and Weibo.

"When it was at its peak, we retracted the function of sharing to Moments. We no longer prompt users to share to Moments by default. Instead, we consciously require users to perform more operations before sharing. We realized that sharing everything to Moments would easily lead to aesthetic fatigue," said Yang Liu, founder of Zuji.

At the end of March 2015, Zuji cancelled the default sharing prompt. "Many of the 30 million users are just joining in the fun. What we need to retain are the loyal users who like this method." Yang Liu said that Zuji still has 10 million monthly active users.

"At that time, we were still a semi-finished product." After experiencing a surge in users and server crashes, Zuji rewrote the entire backend framework and code. "It's like we've been rebuilding our entire product set," Yang Liu said. "If this incident (becoming a phenomenal app) hadn't happened, you might not have realized how weak your own service was and how thin your original foundation was."

It's better to die in a fire than to die at all

“For a good product to be successful, it must go through a process of becoming popular. Without that process, it cannot become a good product,” Huang Guangming, co-founder of Moman Camera, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly. He said that the fact that Magic Man seemed to be silent later was actually the result of a deliberate choice by the company. "From the beginning I knew how and where to make money."

Huang Guangming said that when the number of users was growing rapidly, Moman made a strategic plan: to reach 200 million users and then start to generate revenue. Now, Moman Camera has begun to try commercialization through customization and other means.

In July 2013, after Moman Camera became a "phenomenal application", the entire team was busy fixing loopholes and shortcomings. At the same time, they decided to keep the game simple. "We know that we can have 1 billion to 1.5 billion global users. At that time, we only had 80 million users. We have plenty of time to continue to do so. We just need to maintain the brand first." Huang Guangming believes that the frequency of users using Moman Camera has decreased, but they do not have a bad impression of Moman. "What am I afraid of? I promote it for a long time, and everyone says that the people at Moman are all bastards. Then it's over, and it's a failure."

"Users won't go there every day to do imitation shows, but Miaopai can use it to activate users." Chen Hua believes that from the perspective of the app's functions, Xiaokaxiu is obviously not as viable as Miaopai. "Even if Xiaokaxiu collapses one day and Miaopai survives, we will still make money."

Lei Tao also realized that "it is impossible for people to do imitation shows every day", so Xiaokaxiu is now transforming into a star-making platform and starting to cooperate with some film producers to select roles for the films.

Chen Hua focused his energy on the revision of the Changba App. The new version of Changba has two main lines: offline physical store Maisong KTV and Changba live broadcast room. "We are still working on hardware and slowly laying out the plan to see how big Changba can grow."

"You have to know that most startups die before they become popular. It's already very good if they can become popular," said Chen Hua. At present, there are hundreds of thousands of application development teams in China, and there are as many as 2 million applications on the Android market . However, people generally install no more than 100 applications on each of their mobile phones, and perhaps only dozens of applications are logged in every day.

Becoming a "phenomenal application" will certainly bring pressure to the development team, but it also increases opportunities, including investment or acquisition.

After obtaining investment, you can seek new projects while maintaining the existing application functions to gain new opportunities. Generally speaking, if the application is more tool-based in nature, it can continue to develop in the tool direction, expand profit-making methods, increase the number of users, and seek transformation opportunities. If it is a simple functional application with a large enough number of users, you can consider transforming it into a game, social network or e-commerce platform to improve user monetization capabilities.

After Crazy Guess the Picture, Haoteng Technology developed a series of "crazy games" including Crazy Guess the Song, Crazy Money Find, Crazy World Cup, Crazy Guess the Word, and Crazy Communication. CEO Cao Xiaogang said that the logic of "explosive products" is the same: innovation in content and use of low-cost social platforms to gain attention. "How the product will develop in the future depends on whether users will stay. What the entrepreneurial team can do is to continue developing." But no matter what, the emergence of a "hot product" is a new step for the entrepreneurial team.

For small teams, being acquired or merged by a giant is also a good option. In 2012, Dan Porter became famous for developing Draw My Guess. Zynga then acquired Dan Porter's development team OMGPOP for US$180 million. Although a year later, Zynga closed the OMGPOP studio in order to cut costs.

"No matter whether it can succeed in the end, becoming a phenomenal application is always better than closing down in obscurity." Chen Hua believes that for most applications, "it's better to die after a short burst of popularity than to have never been popular at all."

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