Tiya has been revamped again, and Litchi's sea has been continuing.
The author has disassembled the overseas products of lychee in many articles, and tried to predict whether going overseas can become the second growth curve of lychee, but it turns out that the sea of lychee is not so smooth, and it can even be said that there are setbacks.
But miraculously, despite the constant doubts from the outside world and the erratic market heat, Litchi seems to have been firmly trying to go overseas with audio, and has seized several opportunities and achieved some results. Three times to change the market, three times to catch up with the outlet, Litchi going overseas to some extent has the epitome of the entire Chinese overseas developers, suitable for where to go, users need to produce what they need.
Middle East-Southeast Asia-North America, three attempts to go to sea for lychee
In July 2019, Lizhi brought the voice social product that had a certain amount of voice in China at that time to the United States after a simple revision, and named it Tiya.
In the beginning, Tiya did not do well, and within 1 month of launch, it had less than 5,000 downloads worldwide, most of which came from the Middle East.
Data source: Diandian Data
Fortunately, downloads have been growing positively since launch, with more than 1.5 million downloads a year after launch, and nearly 7,000 downloads a day on December 28, 2019.
With the great momentum, Tiya's parent company Litchi was also listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange on January 17, 2020, with a price of $15.25 per share on the first day of listing.
But after that "scenery", Tiya's voice has not been large, but in fact, Tiya not only did not give up, but also has its own place in the North American market, Tiya has maintained millions of annual downloads in the past year, of which 70% of downloads come from the United States, and nearly 50% of monthly active users come from the United States. Tiya became the representative application of lychee's journey to sea.
But in fact, Tiya is not the only overseas application under Litchi, or even the overseas application in the Litchi prospectus report.
"We are planning to expand our overseas business, and in July 2019, we launched a localized version of our audio entertainment product Sugar Chat in the Middle East and North Africa, which will also attract users in Southeast Asia and reach a global audience in the future," Litchi described in the prospectus.
However, since its listing, Sugar Chat has not appeared in Litchi's earnings report or any public news. According to the CEO of Litchi mentioned in a sharing, it is mainly because there is a certain gap between the product form of Litchi going overseas and the acceptance of market users at that time.
In addition to Sugar Chat, Litchi has also tried to launch Pong Pong, an audio social app in Southeast Asia.
And unlike Sugar Chat, Pong Pong ranked 8th in the global entertainment app ad placement volume in July 2020 by App Growing Global Watch, targeting areas with a high concentration of Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Southeast Asia and Australia.
Screenshot of Pong Pong's 2020 product
As a voice social app that focuses on companionship, Pong Pong's gameplay is very simple.
Users enter the voice live broadcast room and pay a specified fee to unlock different interactive experiences, such as sound explosion, chat, singing, interactive games, accompanying play and even private chat, as long as the gold coins are in place, everything can be negotiated. For example, if users want to get 10 minutes of exclusive interaction time in the live broadcast room, they need to pay 1680 gold coins, about 117 yuan, which is much higher than the regular pricing of Chinese mainland, but this does not affect the enthusiasm of users.
In order to improve the payment situation of users, Pong Pong also accesses a variety of payment channels, and even designs different payment schemes according to the payment habits of users in different markets. According to Diandian data, since its launch in December 2019 to December 2020, Pong Pong has received more than $1 million in on-site recharge.
However, the good times did not last long, and for some reason Pong Pong stopped updating in 2022 and removed the iOS version from the app store.
At this point, Litchi's journey to Southeast Asia has also come to an end, Sugar Chat in the Middle East to Pong Pong in Southeast Asia have all ended in failure, and Litchi's audio social globalization matrix only leaves Tiya, which focuses on the North American market.
Tiya's three fights
As we mentioned earlier, Tiya did not go overseas in North America very smoothly at first, one because the audio social network at that time was not a very mainstream track in North America, and the other was because Tiya did not have a unique product positioning at that time.
Until Tiya seized the opportunity twice in a row and grew into a small overseas audio social product that also has a certain user base.
Tiya download situation in the past 3 years|Data source: Diandian Data
Tiya's 5 download peaks in the past 3 years occurred on November 23, 2020, December 29, 2020, February 1, 2021, March 28, 2021, and May 24, 2021.
Tiya creative delivery in the past 3 years|Data source: Vast Da
The factors that affect downloads are nothing more than product updates, marketing launches, and market popularity, and we reverse what Tiya has done from the download peak.
Deep binding Among Us for the first download peak
In November 2020, Tiya underwent 6 version updates, and the most critical update on November 9, Tiya changed its product positioning from "Meet new People" to "Find a Friend Among Us" through changes to product descriptions and UI.
The next few version updates also focused on providing better services for Among Us matching, and the direct conversion result was that Tiya once ranked in the top 30 of the US App Store and Google Play download list.
And Tiya's brave transformation comes from Among Us' global explosion.
Launched in 2018, Among Us, because the game anchor "brought goods" out of the circle became popular, in just two months on the total download list of app stores in 59 countries and regions around the world, in the case of zero delivery, the number of bimonthly downloads exceeded 80 million, and "space werewolf killing" was popular all over the world.
But at the time, Among US! Players have a very real problem, because Among Us! There is no matchmaking function, so it is difficult for ordinary people to get together opening playmates, let alone so-called high-end games.
So Tiya seized the opportunity to deeply bind to Among Us and packaged itself as a "Among Us matching app", from product subtitles, app store descriptions, ASOs, creatives, and product features, Tiya made itself intersect with Among Us as much as possible.
“Find a Friend Among Us、Among Us Random Match、Among Us Voice Chat、Join Tiya Now to find more friends among us”
Tiya was running creatives at the time
The most exaggerated is that after entering the keyword "Among Us" in the US App Store at that time, the first thing that appeared was Tiya, and then the main one, which shows the big money on ASO, and the direct return is that Tiya achieved more than 100,000 downloads in a single day on November 23.
However, Tiya's downloads have been declining for the next 1 month, and by December, Tiya's results have fallen to more than 100, until Tiya introduced Roblox elements into the platform "Find a friend Roblox & Among Us", which once again boosted downloads, but the change still did not last long.
Seize the industry opportunities presented by Clubhouse and take a second leap
Tiya's third and fourth download peaks occurred on February 1 and March 28, 2021, and both changes were related to Clubhouse.
On February 1, 2021, Clubhouse, which is still in the closed beta stage, became popular around the world, and due to the use of the invitation code registration system, there was a hard-to-find grand situation at home and abroad, and the ebay transaction price exceeded $10. The world's top entrepreneurs, VCs, Internet practitioners, and financial practitioners have gathered on Clubhouse for a while, and people hope to take this opportunity to understand the thinking and cognition of the "big guys", and more ordinary people hope to be able to stand on the front line and eat melons.
However, no matter what kind of psychology, people do want to join Clubhouse, so the overflowing attention and traffic also bring opportunities to other audio social platforms, so audio social platforms including Tiya have obtained a rare industry dividend.
Tiya is also very fast, in the March 2021 version update, Tiya changed the voice room to a Clubhouse-like mode, expanded the original Among Us and Roblox to the entire game track, and then further strengthened the image of Tiya as a service close to Clubhouse by increasing creative placement. So Tiya returned to its peak of nearly 100,000 monthly downloads.
Then Tiya launched the "participate in voice discussion and send Reblux (Roblox token)" campaign to increase the user's opening frequency and usage time, which to some extent ran through both virtual social and gaming tracks, so Tiya downloads grew from early May to mid-May until it reached a new peak on May 24.
Later, Tiya tried to "watch YouTube videos together" and "establish an interest community" to continuously enhance the matching between the platform and user needs. Recently, Tiya is in the midst of its own third round of attempts to integrate AI into the platform.
My AI Friend, the third time, Tiya got into AIGC's car
At present, Tiya has 6 channels, including voice chat, cloud party, truth or dare, screen sharing, watching Youtube videos together, and AI interaction, and users can choose to join or create corresponding channels according to their needs.
All channels are stored in the form of bubbles, and users can click on the corresponding bubbles to view all the running public "voice spaces" under the channel, and click to join.
(1) There is no need to say much about the voice space, after the user joins the voice space, he can view all the users in the room and interact with the user in the room through real-time voice, and can also send private chat or friend application to the user in the room.
(2) Cloud Party, users will join the DJ music scene in the form of "doughnuts, burger treasures, hot dogs, fries", users can interact with other users in the room through barrage and dance, or just relax with the rhythm of the music.
Interestingly, when the user types 10 commands such as "Slide, Jump, Up, Heart Vibe, Switch", the user's meal avatar will perform corresponding actions, which is inexplicably funny. Relatively speaking, the DJ music room is an efficient way for users to get new friends, and the author obtained 4 private messages and 3 friend applications for a "show dance" in the room in the early morning.
(3) YouTube, screen sharing and truth or dare, the 3 types of room experiences are actually almost exactly the same as ordinary voice chat rooms, except that all users in the room can watch YouTube video links uploaded by other users or choose popular videos and screen sharing together, and can also participate in Truth or Dare as a viewer or player.
Basically, it is an interactive version of the ordinary voice room, creating scenes and topics for voice communication, and the author found that many users will share their screens to share the TikTok influencers they follow, mobile phone download apps, and a small number of users play games live.
(4) AI Friend is a feature that Tiya has only recently updated, but from the author's actual experience, the fluency of communication and logic has exceeded many products featuring AI social.
When the author replied that AI My profession is a copywriter, Tiya said that this is cool and continued to ask me about the direction of my attention, when I casually replied that it was the direction of Internet social networking and pan-entertainment, the other party said that this direction is interesting, it usually pays attention to the latest trends in social media and the pan-entertainment industry, and asked the author how he sees the impact of popular "Internet celebrities" on culture and society in recent years.
To be honest, the author was shocked by this conversation, whether it is the depth of the discussion or the professionalism of the problem, it has exceeded the average non-practitioner...
Especially when the author perfunctorily said that it is a good question, AI gave its own point of view, it believes that Internet celebrities are a double-edged sword, on the one hand, Internet celebrities can rely on a huge audience base to provide valuable insights and opinions on many topics and promote the dissemination of knowledge; On the other hand, the excessive promotion of influencers may be narrowing the standard of beauty and lifestyle perception.
And Tiya's AI continued to have in-depth discussions with the author on this issue, and on the other hand, quietly pointed out the author's spelling mistakes in the communication process.
In a way, this conversation even makes Tiya the full-dimensional AI social tool that I am most looking forward to... At present, Tiya AI only supports text interaction, and according to the system prompts, voice, picture, video, and telephone interaction will gradually open up in the future.
In fact, in addition to these 6 channels, users can also join the group chat they are interested in, there are currently hundreds of theme group chats on Tiya, the number of group chats is about 2-8, when the group owner agrees to the user's friend application, users can join the group chat and interact with the group friends.
Although to be honest, Tiya is still not a successful product, but the magic is that Tiya has always been able to combine the opportunity with its own business to varying degrees, and this combination seems very reasonable, and even makes the product look clearer by doing subtraction. This can even be regarded as a rigid need for social overseas entrepreneurship.