Review | How did Douyin, which has been online for 500 days, compete with Kuaishou and Meipai?

The product was meticulously polished for 200 days, and the number of users exceeded 100 million in just half a year after it was launched on the market. The daily video playback exceeded 1 billion, surpassing the old short video players Kuaishou and Meipai. It has long been at the top of the photography and video rankings and ranked second in the overall rankings. How did Douyin achieve such results in just 500 days when it started out as a team of 8? This article attempts to review the situation from the perspective of product and operation, hoping to explore the truth behind it as much as possible.

1｜Introduction

Since the birth of imaging technology, the most popular short video in the world is MV (music video). Music short videos are the most popular part of all short videos. However, MV shooting is difficult. There are many people who can randomly pretend to act in front of the camera, but not many people can speak or sing in front of the camera anytime and anywhere. The lip-syncing performance mode creatively solves this problem. Through audio lines, I have written the script for you, you just need to perform, and the audio length is controlled at 15 seconds, which reduces the cost of expression and increases the interest of the content. Coincidentally, this low-cost content has become easy to spread. At the same time, in this fragmented era, people are more willing to receive short and entertaining content.

Tik Tok is a music-based creative short video social software and a 15-second music short video community focusing on young people. Users can use this software to select songs, shoot 15-second music short videos, create their own works and publish them to the community with one click, so they can get likes, comments and shares from others.

Figure 1. Douyin short video product page (V1.7.3)

In this society where entertainment is everything and entertainment is paramount, facing the entertainment needs of the huge new generation and the second dimension crowd, and at the same time satisfying the public's desire for self-entertainment and "fame", Tik Tok short video uses the following core business logic and product structure as a solution.

Figure 2 The core logic of Tik Tok short videos

Figure 3 Product function structure of Douyin short video

A review of the major events in the development of Tik Tok short videos——

TikTok was launched in September 2016. In just 500 days, it has secured the first place in the App Store’s photography and video application category and the second place in the free list (it occasionally reaches the first place). Within 365 days of its launch, its video has been played more than 1 billion times per day, with more than 10 million daily active users. What a crazy and brilliant achievement this is. It may be unattainable for an ordinary product manager in his lifetime. Let me take a look at what it went through.

The following are important historical events that I have compiled after browsing all the official Tik Tok Weibo posts (2,335), public account articles, and other online materials.

• 2016-09-26 A.me was officially launched.

• 2016-12-22 A.me was renamed Douyin Short Video.

• 2017-01-09 Received millions of seed investment from Toutiao.

• 2017-03-13 Yue Yunpeng reposted a short video with the Douyin watermark, which was reposted 5083 times and received 83175 likes.

• 2017-06-23 TikTok officially released the promotional video of TikTok×The Rap of China shot by Kris Wu.

• 2017-08-11 The product manager revealed that VV has exceeded 1 billion.

• 2017-08-16 App Store #Star APP List# became one of the top five most popular apps in July.

• 2017-08-19 Douyin has made a strong entry into "Happy Camp".

• 2017-09-02 The first Douyin idou night was held and began to expand offline.

• 2017-09-15 Strong appearance on Hunan Satellite TV’s “Day Day Up”.

• 2017-09-22 First brand video advertising cooperation with Airbnb, Chevrolet and Harbin Beer.

• 2017-11-10 Toutiao acquired Musical.ly for US$1 billion and merged it with Douyin.

• 2017-12-30 Simultaneously sponsored the New Year’s Eve concerts of Jiangsu Satellite TV, Zhejiang Satellite TV and Hunan Satellite TV.

• 2018-01-23 Ranked first on Thailand’s free list, internationalization highlights its effectiveness.

• 2018-02-01 Kris Wu officially took office as the Chief Operating Officer of Douyin.

This article will attempt to answer this question -

In just 500 days, Tik Tok has grown from nothing to an app that is used by everyone, making users scream and say that they are addicted to Tik Tok. What interesting things have happened in the meantime, and what detours have been taken? In particular, what actions has Douyin taken in terms of products and operations to accelerate this development miracle?

Competitive product overview

The Douyin short video APP does not have any first-mover advantage in the short video field. Kuaishou, the domestic short video leader, was founded in 2011, and Miaopai, owned by Sina Weibo, was founded in 2012. Even Meipai (2014) and Xiaokaxiu (2015) were launched more than a year earlier than Douyin. Fortunately, Douyin chose the more niche music short video field to focus on, and finally achieved overtaking.

The following are the main competitors:

• Kuaishou: The current leader in the short video field, it received US$350 million in financing led by Tencent in March 2017. As of November 2017, the number of daily active users has exceeded 100 million, the total number of registered users has exceeded 700 million, and more than 10 million new video content is generated every day.

• Miaopai: With the strong traffic import from Sina Weibo, it easily achieves tens of millions of daily active users and over 100 million daily playbacks. However, Miaopai’s ability to generate its own traffic is relatively poor, and its traffic is overly dependent on Sina Weibo, resulting in a low development bottleneck. In terms of capital, on November 21, 2016, Miaopai's parent company Yixia Technology confirmed the completion of a US$500 million Series E financing round, with a valuation of over US$3 billion.

• Haokan Video: Baidu’s own product, relying on Baidu’s powerful technology and strong financial strength, since its release on November 16, 2017, it has rushed to the 27th place in the entertainment free list. Due to its late entry, the product is still in the polishing stage.

Kuaishou is the leading short video APP in China, with its user base mainly concentrated in third- and fourth-tier cities. The platform's influencers mainly attract traffic by showing off their wealth, showing off their babies, acting silly, singing, and dancing. How to penetrate into first- and second-tier cities has always been a pain point for Kuaishou. As of today, Kuaishou has not seen a breakthrough in this deadlock. Douyin's user base is mainly concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, and the general age is under 24, which is exactly the group that Kuaishou cannot reach and attract. Therefore, in the field of music short videos, I think the probability of Kuaishou defeating Douyin in the short term is not high.

Another competitor, Miaopai, is overly dependent on Weibo. Xiaokaxiu, which belongs to the same parent company, lacks stamina due to its over-reliance on celebrity hype. Although Xiaokaxiu also launched "Huangka" to compete with Douyin, the market response is not significant, and the road to encircling Douyin is also very arduous.

As for Baidu's Haokan Video, we don't see its ability to challenge TikTok for the time being, but it is worth paying attention to and looking forward to in the future.

The above is just a simple statement of the competitive situation. In order to make the article more focused, no further analysis will be carried out. The analysis perspective of the entire article will be mainly focused on Tik Tok short videos, and in-depth analysis reports for each type of product will be output separately in the future.

2｜Product Growth Analysis

2.1 Analysis of overall product development trend

Up to now, 38 versions of Douyin iOS have been released. How does the Douyin team arrange feature priorities and control the release rhythm? Let’s take a look together. In order to more intuitively see the entire development trajectory and speed of Douyin short videos, we have sorted out Figures 4 and 5.

Figure 4: Growth in downloads of Tik Tok short videos on Android (click to see larger image)

Figure 5: Changes in the ranking of Tik Tok short videos in the overall iOS ranking and the photography and video sub-categories (click to see the full picture)

By looking at the product download growth curve in Figure 4 and the product category ranking changes in Figure 5, we can divide the development of Douyin short videos into three stages:

Figure 6 Overview of the development stages of Tik Tok short videos (click to see larger image)

Phase 1:

September 2016 to April 2017 – Product Exploration

At this stage, the overall influence of Douyin short videos in the market can be ignored, and it is basically in the stage of groping and exploring the product direction. Although it was positioned as a music short video community for young people from the beginning, it still took some time to explore the style of the early products and user preferences, and even changed the product name (from A.me to Douyin Short Video).

Phase 2:

May 2017 to December 2017 — The first wave of product development

During this stage, Douyin achieved explosive growth in its products. By continuously increasing its investment in operations, the number of users increased more than 10 times in just half a year! The main growth engine in this stage is the operation side. By continuously sponsoring popular variety shows, including "The Rap of China", "Happy Camp" and "Day Day Up", it quickly attracted a large number of Chinese little flowers who pursue independence, individuality and have nowhere to go for loneliness. This is the most important development stage of Douyin so far. This stage has completely exposed Douyin to the public, achieved dual diffusion of brand and product, and established its leading position in the music short video category. With the rapid growth during this period, Douyin also began to explore the path to commercialization.

Phase 3:

December 2017 to present: the second wave of rapid product growth

During this period, TikTok has long been in the top two of the iOS rankings and ranked first in the photography and video subcategories, basically securing the title of the most popular APP in the first quarter of 2018. At this stage, Douyin is already fully capable of achieving self-growth, but no one expected that online "live Q&A" would become a new trend at the beginning of the year. In this golden age of traffic, no one is willing to give up the opportunity to attract traffic at ultra-low cost. By introducing the new trend of "live Q&A", Douyin ushered in the second wave of rapid product growth and continued to move forward.

In the following analysis, we will interpret these stages in detail.

2.2 Product Phase Iteration Analysis

1. Product exploration period (September 2016 to April 2017)

The product exploration period for all C-end products involves locking in target users, finding user characteristics and needs, contacting users to verify product functions, and continuously polishing them. Douyin is no exception.

As a mature market, short videos do not require Tik Tok to invest energy in educating users. Short videos have been deeply cultivated by many businesses in the domestic market for many years. Products include Kuaishou, Miaopai, Xiaokaxiu, etc. Xiaokaxiu, which was once very popular, became popular through celebrity lip-syncing, and to a large extent educated domestic users to accept this simple and easy way of entertaining themselves and others.

At this stage, as a brand-new short video community, the biggest difficulty facing Douyin is how to attract the public to access the Internet. For an APP that focuses on magical music short videos, it is not possible to rashly use operational means to attract new users before the overall style and functions of the product are confirmed. However, it is necessary to attract a group of users to use the app and provide feedback in order to gradually clarify the product functions. This cold start is a challenge for Douyin.

The main user groups in this stage: experts who have the need to show themselves.

The core user needs at this stage: have fun, be able to shoot magical videos, and make exquisite MVs.

The commercial needs of Tik Tok at this stage are: to attract influencers to join the platform and to shoot as many interesting, informative and unique music short videos as possible.

Product main iteration version & iteration logic analysis:

In terms of product version iteration, this stage covers V1.0.0~V1.4.0, which is mainly used to confirm the product style, find the best way for young people to receive music short videos, and complete the transformation of the product from internal YY to being used and accepted by hundreds of thousands of users.

This stage is when Douyin faces the most difficulties, because this stage directly determines the success or failure of Douyin. It was also during this stage that Douyin changed its name from A.me to Douyin Short Video in version V1.2.2 in order to find a better way to reach users. It also changed its product logo and focused on improving the capabilities of its own video shooting tools.

Another point is that as a music short video entertainment community, Douyin itself has a weak social gene. Therefore, at the beginning, the Douyin team tried to expand the social limitations of Douyin by searching the address book, inviting QQ friends and Weibo friends, etc.

In versions V1.0~V1.2.2, in addition to the polishing of basic shooting functions, the main change is that the product name is changed from A.me to Douyin Short Video.

In version V1.1.0, which is the second version officially released to the public, Douyin added social functions, supporting searching the address book, inviting QQ and Weibo friends, etc. Although this is a basic capability, giving it such a high priority can more or less show the Douyin team's desire for social interaction, and they also want to drive product growth through social interaction.

User Reviews:

The Douyin team inherited the strong technical genes of Toutiao. When the product was first launched, it performed very well in terms of video viewing smoothness, shooting and uploading. In addition, the vertical full-screen immersive viewing interaction greatly lowered the user threshold and user acceptance was very high.

Most of the user reviews at this stage are positive, which is rare for a new app. By continuously optimizing video shooting, adding beauty, filters and stickers to enhance the viewing and enjoyment of video shooting, users will be amazed~

On the other hand, some more avant-garde or veterans based in the Internet industry are hostile, mainly because Douyin's overall positioning and interaction are suspected of "plagiarizing" a similar music short video application in North America, musical.ly. It happened that musical.ly did not make efforts in China and focused on North America. It was not until June 6, 2017 that musical.ly was renamed muse and officially entered China. At this time, Douyin had already established the top spot in domestic music short videos. On November 10, 2017, Toutiao purchased the North American music short video social platform Musical.ly for US$1 billion and will merge it with TikTok. Of course, this is all a story for later.

In addition, many users reported that they were unable to log in normally, regardless of whether they used a mobile phone number, QQ, WeChat, or Weibo. The author speculates that due to limited manpower investment during the exploration period, there may have been only one tester or product manager doing part-time testing. As an ordinary module, it may not have received enough attention. It is also possible that no stress testing was conducted, resulting in the inability to log in during peak hours. Of course, this problem was quickly resolved by the Douyin team.

Operational strategies at this stage:

During this stage, Douyin did not adopt any radical operational methods. It mainly established topic video challenges within Douyin to stimulate the growth of the video library. At the same time, it hired professional dance or music experts to shoot videos and posted them on major video platforms for publicity and traffic.

On Baidu News, it was not until March 15 that Yue Yunpeng gained some exposure because he reposted a short video on Weibo with a Douyin watermark from a user named Yue Yunyun on January 13. Of course, after browsing the Weibo of the short video on Douyin, it can be found that it was not accidental that Yue Yunpeng forwarded this Weibo, but the operator repeatedly @岳云鹏's Weibo, which eventually attracted Yue Yunpeng's attention and forwarded it. Yue Yunpeng is a big V with more than 10 million fans. This Weibo was forwarded 5083 times and liked 83175 times, which directly led to Douyin entering the public eye for the first time.

As for the official Weibo, not much energy was invested in its operation at first. The product was launched on September 26, 2016, and the first Weibo post was not published until November 2, 2016 (just after the release of version V1.1.0). This Weibo post may have been pushed forward by internal leaders because of the launch of the new version. Of course, it is also possible that the product manager posted it part-time, and there was no dedicated person to operate the Weibo at this time.

During this stage, the number of Weibo users following the app was extremely low, and the means of operation was simply to occasionally forward videos of experts with the Tik Tok watermark. The number of comments and user forwardings was basically negligible.

Stage summary:

For the TikTok team, the number of users is not the primary consideration at this stage. The most important thing is to find a way out of the black box of the business as quickly as possible. By actually contacting users, adjusting all previous internal fantasies about users, continuously optimizing and adjusting products with real user feedback and data, and then continuously reaching out to potential target users, and then adjusting based on feedback…finding a balance between the product’s commercial value and users as quickly as possible. It can be clearly felt from user comments that Douyin has done this.

2. Product growth period (May 2017 to December 2017)

After half a year of product exploration and data accumulation, Douyin has basically completed the first round of product polishing and accumulation of initial users. Having successfully completed the cold start, the next issue faced is how to expand market share, expand territory as quickly as possible, seize the top spot in domestic music short videos, and then attack the short video overlord "Kuaishou". However, this battle is not easy. Kuaishou just completed a new round of US$350 million investment at the end of March. At the same time, domestic BAT giants have all invested in the short video market. The war in the short video field is far from over.

The main user groups at this stage are the post-95 generation in China who pursue independence and freedom and put entertainment first.

The core user needs at this stage are: to please yourself, explore more ways to play videos, shoot more beautiful and interesting videos, and hope to be appreciated by everyone.

The business needs of TikTok at this stage are: to attract users to seize market share and to test the business model while ensuring daily VV (video views).

Product main iteration version & iteration logic analysis:

This phase mainly covered product versions V1.4.2 to V1.6.7, which were iterated 18 times in total for the public. The entire iterative process mainly revolves around the following three questions:

• How to make the photo shoot better.

• How to make photoshooting more fun.

• How to increase the platform’s attractiveness to influencers and initially explore business models.

The answer given by Douyin is to shoot more beautiful videos by continuously optimizing filters, beauty, stickers, etc.; adding shooting methods such as hair dyeing, music, AR camera, dance machine to increase the fun of shooting; in attracting influencers, using black technology to more intelligently distribute videos, increase the frequency of contact between influencers and potential audiences, and increase the attention and love of influencers. At the same time, the platform actively helps influencers to connect to Weibo homepage, so that influencers can direct traffic to Weibo and realize monetization with the help of Weibo's ecosystem.

In version V1.4.5, the "Fresh" on the homepage was changed to "Nearby", and the promotional message was changed from reading the latest exciting content to discovering interesting people around you. The author believes that this change means that the homepage already has a recommendation page, and users mainly browse on the recommendation page. The fresh and recommended pages overlap to a certain extent in the coverage of expert videos. The background data of the fresh page shows that user usage is not high (guess). At the same time, Douyin has been strengthening the social attributes of its products. The nearby page can arouse the public's curiosity about the experts around them, and they are more willing to watch the stories of people around them. On the other hand, increasing the exposure of experts to nearby people is actually a traffic distribution mechanism.

Version V1.5.1 supports influencers to bind their personal Weibo homepages, and supports one-click jump to the Weibo page. Although it is a very small function iteration, when Douyin has not clarified the monetization path for influencers, it can use the Weibo ecosystem to monetize, increasing the weight of attracting influencers to join the platform.

During this stage, Douyin also began to cooperate with businesses to carry out information flow advertising, starting the exploration of business models. On September 21, 2017, Douyin launched three brand video advertisements in cooperation with Airbnb, Harbin Beer and Chevrolet, which were a huge success. Wang Xiaowei, product manager of Douyin, said: This model will be the focus of Douyin's commercialization in the future.

In version V1.6.0, the live broadcast function was added "cautiously". The reason for this is that the entrance to the live broadcast room is very secretive (currently, the story column, the avatar on the personal homepage, and the avatar on the right side of the video are the entrances to the three live broadcast rooms). At the same time, certain conditions must be met before the live broadcast function can be activated. According to information revealed by an internet celebrity today, only those with more than 50,000 fans on Douyin have the right to broadcast live. However, TikTok responded: "It is based on a comprehensive consideration of previous performance on the site. The number of fans is not the only criterion."

Live streaming already has a mature business model, and short videos and live streaming have a natural fit. Both revolve around the in-depth operation of platform experts. Entering the live streaming field through short videos is a very sharp method. On the contrary, it is not so easy to switch from live streaming to short videos. However, can experts who have become famous through short videos adapt to instant live streaming, and will users buy into it? These are still unknown and require continued observation.

User reviews:

The overall evaluation during this period was positive, and many users said that they were addicted to Douyin and could not extricate themselves. One or two hours a day passed by on Douyin without them noticing. At the same time, it can also be seen that this stage has achieved the effect of shooting beautiful and fun videos, which can be seen from user comments.

Even many old Kuaishou users have switched to Douyin.

On the other hand, with the surge in users, the Douyin backend system has been under great data pressure. Although the Douyin team has made certain preparations for the surge in traffic, there are still many cases of being unable to log in, video playback being stuck, and the network being overwhelmed. I believe that every time there is a product upgrade, the Douyin technical team will have a sleepless night.

Operational strategies at this stage:

The overall operational strategy at this stage can be summed up as: spending money to appear on the most popular programs.

After Yue Yunpeng’s Weibo account first entered the public eye in March 2017, the number of users began to grow, and the Douyin team also began to gradually increase Douyin’s media operations. Also on March 23 of the same year, direct competitor "Kuaishou" completed a new round of US$350 million investment led by Tencent and began to vigorously promote its brand in the market. This to a certain extent accelerated the time for Douyin to be fully launched into the market, and a new round of money-burning war in the short video field officially began. Of course, unlike the subsidy war between Didi and Kuaidi back then, this time the money was mainly spent on marketing and promotion, and all kinds of the most popular variety shows became the commanding heights that both sides were vying for.

Through inquiries on the Internet and official channels, we have sorted out the media sponsorship of Douyin during this period:

Through the above continuous and strong advertising placement and bombardment, Douyin's user base has increased more than 10 times in just half a year, and the daily video playback volume exceeded 1 billion in August of the same year. It is not difficult to find that Douyin has basically sponsored all the mainstream variety shows in 2017. Through the traffic brought by the programs themselves, Douyin has occupied a leading position in similar markets and products, and jumped to the second place on the iOS overall list, and has long been ranked first in the photography and video category.

Stage summary:

After this round of growth, Douyin has established a firm foothold in the domestic short video field. However, it is far from time to draw a conclusion as to who will be the ultimate king of domestic short videos. Although the overall video content within the Douyin community is better than that of Kuaishou, Kuaishou is far ahead of Douyin in terms of user retention, daily video output and daily video playback volume. It is the absolute short video overlord. I am looking forward to all the changes and constants that will come.

3. High-speed self-growth period (December 2017 to present)

At the beginning of 2018, after the national husband Wang Sicong started to spend money, live quiz products became the first trend of the year and began to sweep the country. In this golden age of traffic, the customer acquisition cost of live quiz products is about 3 yuan, which is far lower than the normal market price of dozens or hundreds of yuan.

How could the domestic super unicorn Toutiao miss this opportunity? They have integrated its aircraft carrier product Toutiao, its video matrix products Huoshan Video, Douyin Short Video, and Xigua Video, and added the live quiz show "Millionaire Heroes".

After rapid expansion in the second half of last year, TikTok has firmly established itself at the top of the photography and video application rankings. The brand effect of itself will also bring in considerable natural traffic. With the help of low-cost traffic from Million Heroes, it has further consolidated its position. In addition, the TikTok team has also begun to gradually develop in an international direction.

The main user groups in this stage are those who have entertainment needs and are willing to actively explore the fun of life.

The core user needs at this stage: entertain yourself and kill boring time.

Douyin’s business needs at this stage: consolidate market position, internationalize and explore the boundaries of product business models.

Product main iteration version & iteration logic analysis:

In versions V1.68~V1.73, the product functions have gone through the baptism of the second half of 2017. The goal of shooting videos has basically been achieved to make them more beautiful and more fun. This line has become stable and the product has not changed much. In addition to strategically adding entrances to "Millionaire" to attract traffic, the biggest changes revolve around reporting and commenting.

It is not difficult to analyze that with the surge in users, the video community is suddenly filled with all kinds of people. As a public video community, it is impossible to completely avoid bad users uploading videos that destroy the community atmosphere in order to satisfy their personal interests or desires. The current Douyin community is a large market with all kinds of people. This is a potential crisis for Douyin. Improper handling may lead to a large number of old users leaving.

In version V1.6.8, Douyin added a quiz game with prizes called "Millionaire Heroes" in the first version of the new year.

In version V1.70, the reporting and comment modules have been refined to enable more refined community management. At the same time, reasons for reporting need to be provided to increase the credibility of the review. The author speculates that the account blocking management was initially automated based on the number of reporting labels. This may have led to organized malicious reporting, resulting in innocent users being blocked and causing user dissatisfaction. As the number of videos increased dramatically, this unreviewed approach, on the one hand, increased the back-end customer service costs (of course, if Douyin did not have dedicated customer service staff, it would also bring the risk of user loss). On the other hand, it was not easy to trace the cause of the report, and subsequent account restoration work could not be carried out.

V1.7.1 adds original music categories and expands the proprietary music library (this will be discussed in more detail in the later operational analysis).

User reviews:

During this stage, the positive evaluation of users has been very obvious. The surge in users has also expanded the boundaries of community videos. It is not limited to the field of music videos. There will be many special videos such as jokes, games, and animals becoming spirits, which further increases the compatibility of the community.

At the same time, the product still has not been able to completely get rid of the problem of lag, especially at the beginning of Million Heroes, you can clearly feel that the video playback on the homepage is sluggish, stuck or even crashes.

Operational strategies at this stage:

As a music short video product, Douyin has two very important points from its name, one is music, and the other is short video. As an important subject of short videos, music faces problems such as copyright and limited quantity. First of all, as there is no information about Douyin being complained about in terms of music copyright, Douyin may have purchased the music copyright, so no analysis will be conducted for the time being; secondly, the background music that can be used to shoot interesting and fun videos is limited. If the Douyin community is filled with a large number of identical music and videos with no novelty, it will cause visual fatigue to the general users and cause them to abandon the platform.

On January 25, 2018, Douyin launched the Douyin Original Music Plan, teaming up with 8 judges and hundreds of well-known musicians to find free and independent original musicians. On the one hand, it provides an outlet for original musicians, and on the other hand, it expands the music library of Douyin’s own community, benefiting both others and oneself, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone.

In terms of internationalization, Douyin's business has covered Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, North America, Europe, Latin America and other regions around the world. In terms of funding, Toutiao plans to invest hundreds of millions of US dollars to support its overseas expansion. Douyin, under the name Tik Tok, quietly launched its overseas presence in August last year and has achieved remarkable results in Japan, Thailand, South Korea and other countries. In Japan, it not only surpassed global short video giants such as YouTube and Instagram in the photography and video categories, but also surpassed Spotify, LINE and other applications that have dominated the top of the list for many years, becoming the number one app on the Japanese App Store's free list.

(Thai market on the left, Japanese market on the right)

3｜Summary and reflection on the in-depth analysis of TikTok

Through the analysis of Tik Tok short videos up to February 2018, we have benefited a lot in both product and operation. I would like to pay tribute to the Tik Tok team and the Musical.ly team. In terms of products, after confirming the main framework of the product, the Douyin team reserved a large amount of room for error and has not made any major reconstruction adjustments to the product architecture so far. It has been about 500 days and nights since the first version of Douyin was released, and the pace of releasing a version has basically been maintained at an average of 10 days. Although the agile development and small step and fast running methodology have been talked about a lot in the Internet circle, there are very few teams that can actually make it work, which shows that the entire team is very capable.

In addition to the team's efforts and the platform itself, what can we learn from Douyin's success for our product people? I think there are two:

1. For pure Internet products, the product is always the foundation. You need to give your team and product some time to polish it carefully (TikTok took 7 months to polish it before increasing its investment in the market). Don’t excessively pursue the number of users in the early stage.

2. Try your best to maintain the product tone, maintain the internal atmosphere of the product, and carefully explore and expand the product boundaries.

Regarding the second point, a special explanation is needed. Since Douyin invested a lot of manpower in the early stage to build a decentralized video distribution algorithm, even if it makes efforts on the operation side to attract a large number of people in the later stage, it can still push the videos they like to the original old users in a targeted manner without causing ideological shock. For other types of products, you should not blindly and excessively exert efforts on the operation side, otherwise it may backfire, causing new users to have no feelings, no perception, and no interest in the product; old users are not adapted to the atmosphere, are disgusted with or even abandon the product, resulting in a large number of user losses, which can be said to be a loss of both the wife and the army.

4｜About the future development and prospects of Douyin

Tik Tok is undoubtedly one of the most popular applications in 2017, and has also achieved remarkable results internationally, which can be said to be extremely popular. Throughout the long river of history, there has never been a lack of short-lived glory. A representative and comparable product - Xiaokaxiu, is a living example. I remember that the emergence of Xiaokaxiu attracted more than half of the entertainment stars to participate in it, but because it was too centralized and not friendly enough to the public, they eventually left the stage after the public became tired of it, leaving behind a group of boring actors who were forgotten by the public.

Douyin has learned from the experience of Xiaokaxiu in this regard, and has not yet used celebrity support on a large scale. The surprising thing is that due to the popularity of its own products, it has also attracted many celebrities to join the Douyin community. Of course, Douyin does not provide any special treatment to celebrities and still maintains a "decentralized" product concept.

After the last round of surge, Douyin cannot sit back and relax. On the contrary, the entire team faces many difficulties, such as:

1. As a new generation of music short video application, how to digest the users who download and use it under the influence of the market, including the core users of Douyin who were born after 1995, as well as those born after 1990, 1985, 1980 and even 1975, and how to reduce excessive loss?
2. A large number of internal videos are shot by Douyin assistants as part of the activity. This will inevitably result in a large number of repeated and unwatchable videos, which naturally cannot bring traffic and love to the influencers. On the one hand, it will cause fatigue to ordinary players, and on the other hand, the influencers will not feel motivated, thus falling into a vicious circle.
3. We have talked about the issues of music copyright and quantity before. It can be seen that the Douyin team has tried its best to solve the above problems by supporting the import of local music, initiating original music creation activities, etc. However, the effect is still unknown at present. From a longer-term perspective, purchasing a large number of music copyrights through capital should be the mainstream route. At the same time, personalized music recommendations can be made through algorithms to activate the frequency of use of long-tail music.
4. The internationalization of TikTok will also be the main goal in 2018. The localization team has relatively limited experience in the international market, and blindly expanding the international team will also bring many management problems. Internationalization is a new topic for the entire management of TikTok. The TikTok team needs to figure out the direction of the future.
5. …

The TikTok team still has a long way to go, but as a product that has only been online for 500 days, TikTok has already passed its most difficult time. Even if the future becomes more difficult, it will not be a fatal blow to the team.

So far. The in-depth analysis of Douyin has come to an end. Although I have not participated in every stage of Douyin, it is still very exciting and memorable to review the development history of Douyin from the perspective of an observer. This includes the name change of A.me to Douyin short video, how to avoid product tooling (guiding sharing, increasing community operation efforts, etc.), actively directing traffic to Weibo when there is no clear monetization path, and continuously adding shooting methods to expand product boundaries in an orderly manner.

Finally, I would like to give the TikTok team a poem by the Austrian poet Rilke:

“Wer spricht von Siegen? Überstehn ist Alles” – When it comes to victory, holding on means everything.

The author of this article @Four compiled and published by (Qinggua Media), please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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