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WeChat’s Simple Keys To Success: Hire Smart Folks, Work Bloody Hard

Tencent’s (HKG:0700) WeChat is successful, not only in China but it is also gaining traction in other Asian regions. That is only achieved with a lot of hard work and countless hours of late coding, UX planning, and executing.

It’s rare seeing big companies like Tencent acting as agile as a startup. So the WeChat story has so far been a good one to follow so far. Chinese companies expanding internationally is not especially common, making Tencent’s story all the more interesting. A Tencent representative who we spoke to recently told us that WeChat success isn’t as easy as pushing the app to its large user base across QQ, Qzone, etc. There is a lot of hard work to be done. We were told that the WeChat team usually works until 5am (no kidding!) in the morning just to get things completed. The Tencent rep told us:

We hire very talented people; we hire the most hardworking people in the industry. Chinese people are working crazy hard – the WeChat team works until 4am or 5am; that’s normal, that’s the whole team, we’re not talking about a certain division, that’s the whole team working very late. The WeChat team values feedback very much just so they could improve their products. The more local the better, as they look to add in more localization specifics for users in Indonesia. “That’s the difference between ourselves and our competitors,” said the representative.

We asked why the team is willing to work till so late into the night to make WeChat a success. The Tencent rep told us that the team is a motivated bunch, saying: Everyday I wake up, I ask myself, “What drives me to work?” My dream is to have more people use my product [WeChat] – that becomes my happiness. Every team member shares the same goal, the same dream, so you can largely make them work past 2 or 5am to make this product the most successful. We don’t do that by ordering [them], but everybody is doing that for themselves.