What exactly is Momo?

You will look for it everywhere only when you really need it.

From this concept, it is not difficult to understand why Jack Ma and his Alibaba are so eager to find a foothold in the mobile Internet, because mobile Taobao, Alipay, etc. are also tools. They cannot bind users. Their installed base is huge, but users will not stay on these products for too long. The purpose of opening Alipay is to transfer money or make payments; the purpose of opening Taobao is to shop, and the purpose is clear and explicit.

Momo is also such a product. Many users install and uninstall Momo over and over again. This is because in their minds, Momo is just a tool-like product that they rarely use in their daily lives, and the chances of opening and using it are slim.

So Momo should not be a social platform, but a social tool. The concept of a platform is to bind users, while the tool is to serve users. Momo’s previous tool attribute was reflected in “hooking up”, but after it was whitewashed, it was reflected in interests, entertainment, and playing together.

What is the value of Momo?

Compared with many social products that seek to be large and comprehensive, Momo's activity level is relatively much higher, which benefits from Momo's positioning.

Putting aside the dimensions of acquaintances and strangers, if we look at the user attributes of Momo and WeChat, we will find that people of all ages use WeChat, while Momo users are relatively concentrated in the post-90s age group.

The Internet is flooded with analytical articles about the post-90s generation, and the attention paid to post-90s entrepreneurs on the Internet is gradually becoming hot. IDG has even set up a fund specifically for investing in post-90s generations.

Momo's users are precisely the post-90s group that many people are studying now. This is Momo's greatest value. In fact, in terms of the tool itself, there are stranger social networking and interest-based social networking that are better than Momo, but the key to Momo is that it has captured such a group of people.

If we use an analogy to look at Momo, Momo's survival is that it has found a middle point between mobile QQ (not WeChat) and Tieba.

Compared to QQ Mobile, Momo is more fun, and compared to Tieba, Momo's users are more focused. Perhaps Momo never intended to be a stranger's WeChat from the beginning, but to be an alternative tool to capture the rebellious and curious post-90s generation.

In a report about Momo, there was an interesting passage:

"In Tang Yan's ideal world, Momo will become another dimension for people to socialize. For example, if moms in the neighborhood want to get to know each other and discuss nearby playgrounds and places to buy clothes for their children, they no longer need to take their children to the neighborhood park to get to know each other. They can just open Momo."

Unfortunately, in China's social relationships where acquaintances are paramount, there is a natural barrier between online and offline, so Tang Yan's idea is simply not valid.

But the post-90s generation may become a breakthrough.

Is Momo worth $3 billion?

The price of WhatsApp when it was monetized was US$16 billion. With 400 million users, the average value generated by each user was US$40. The latest valuation of WeChat should be around US$70 billion. Compared with its approximately 700 million users, the value of each user is about US$100.

The difference between WhatsApp and WeChat is that WeChat has become a universal portal to mobile Internet in China, while WhatsApp is a simple communication tool.

An interesting thing about Americans’ attitude towards Internet products is that they don’t like big and comprehensive products like WeChat. They believe that a product should be designed for a specific purpose, rather than being able to do everything.

WeChat, based on the portal, has many additional functions, including CRM management, light App center, media attributes, social tools, etc. Based on this, the value of a single user has reached $100.

Whatspp and WeChat are two extremes in IM, but these two products should not be the templates that Momo should refer to.

In my opinion, Momo is now more like a location-based mobile network distribution platform, and the two tools it should refer to most are Amap + 91 Mobile Assistant.

Because we can see the current progress of Momo's commercialization. The first thing it opened was game joint operation, and the second was the O2O model such as store access. This is the combination of the two business models of Amap + 91.

An interesting phenomenon is that the number of users of AutoNavi and 91 when they were acquired was roughly equivalent to the current number of users of Momo, and their prices were US$1.9 billion and US$1.6 billion respectively.

Generally speaking, the difference is not that big. Momo is worth $3 billion because no matter what, users will use it frequently even if they treat it as work, but if it wants to take a step further, I don’t know what other attributes Tang Yan will implant into Momo, but it is obvious that the further it goes, the more difficult it will be to go.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.