Alex Zhu Insights on Consumer Product

A must watch video for product people from Alex Zhu co-founder and co-CEO of Musical.ly (currently President at TikTok) giving us insights on the consumer product and some of the key lessons learned from his failure and success .

Musical.ly was an app through which users could create 15 sec lip-syncing music videos, it was launched in Aug 2014. In June 2016, musical.ly had over 90 million registered users, up from 10 million a year earlier. By the end of May 2017, the app reached over 200 million users. ByteDance acquired musical.ly Inc. on November 9, 2017, and merged it  into TikTok on August 2, 2018. This introduced TikTok to a bigger, worldwide community

Some of the highlights from Alex Zhu’s interview on Consumer Product are :

• If you want a build a new UGC (User Generated Content) platform, content has to be extremely light i.e. content creation and consumption should be within seconds
• Primary use of mobile app has been to Communicate and Entertain, better to Follow the human nature rather than changing hence the focus for Musical.ly was to build something to entertain
• Better to target young people as early adopters ,as these users have time , are creative and well connected socially thus becoming the brand promoters which reduces the distribution cost
• Initial focus should be on utility (Example Instagram initial users just used it for filter and not feeds or likes they used the edited pictures to share on other social media like Facebook ) , once we have initial users then focus on community to make the application mainstream
• Use Participatory design to stay close to the users – which is to involve end users during the design process
• Share ideas and mock-ups with the end users before any coding is done.
• Interesting analogy with US economy to explain centralized economy (traffic flow)
• Revenue streams for social media Influencers , how to build an ecosystem to monetize, for company as well as creators