Surprisingly, Lemon8, a social app, soared to the top of the United States App Store charts.
Data.ai data shows that since September this year, Lemon8 has been the most downloaded lifestyle app on iOS devices in the United States, and has also entered the top 20 in the ranking of all iOS apps; It also ranks among the top 7 lifestyle apps among Android devices. This is another outbreak since Lemon8 entered the United States market.
In fact, since last year, this platform has quietly squeezed into the United States app download list, quickly capturing a group of users with its social attributes through image recommendation and sharing, and United States Internet celebrities describe it as a combination of Pinterest and Instagram. In the Chinese media, Lemon8 is more regarded as the "overseas version of Xiaohongshu".
You may not know that this APP, which is popular in Europe and the United States, comes from a Chinese team and comes from ByteDance.
The overseas version of Xiaohongshu is on fire
Doxxing Lemon8
As another hit of ByteDance, how was Lemon8 created?
Inside Bytes, Lemon8 is headed by Chen Ying, who reports to Alex that the two had a superior-subordinate relationship during the musical.ly period, and musical.ly is the predecessor of TikTok, the famous overseas version of Douyin. With the acquisition of ByteDance in musical.ly 2017, Chen Ying and Zhu Jun also joined Byte.
Until March 2020, a social platform called Sharee was officially born in Bytes. As the name suggests, Shasene focuses on sharing and planting, and first set its sights on overseas markets. This year is the year when ByteDance has accelerated overseas.
Around the same time, founder Zhang Yiming issued an internal letter announcing the appointments of Zhang Lidong and Zhang Nan, and he himself shifted his main focus to "leading the company's global strategy and development". At that time, TikTok was facing the dilemma of being attacked by the enemy, and this internal letter was an important signal for ByteDance to make efforts in overseas markets.
It is against this backdrop that Sharee emerged. At the beginning of its birth, the team of Sharee set the first stop in Japan, on the one hand, because Japan was still a blank market at that time, and on the other hand, the local beauty culture was booming, and Sharee wanted to cut into it.
In September 2021, Shasene officially changed its name to Lemon8. The name is inspired by the similarly pronounced "Lemonade", which means wanting to share something new like refreshing lemonade, while 8 is derived from the mathematical symbol "∞", which means the concept of infinite magnificence.
Since then, Lemon8 has been positioned more precisely, planting grass for interests, mainly for young women in their twenties and thirties, and the content is mostly presented in pictures and videos, covering fashion, beauty, food, fitness and travel and other fields. This is highly overlapping with Xiaohongshu's main content attributes.
It's more similar to how Lemon8 browses. For example, for one-sided video streams such as Douyin and Tik Tok, there is only one content on the entire page; The two-sided graphic stream, which is dominated by Xiaohongshu and Instagram, is a browsing interface composed of multiple covers. Therefore, Lemon8 is also known as the "overseas version of Xiaohongshu".
(Lemon8 interface, from user sharing)
Soon, Lemon8 made a small improvement in Japan, and the cumulative number of downloads exceeded 1 million in March 2022. At the same time, ByteDance began to lead Lemon8 to accelerate its expansion, and successively entered many Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.
It is not until 2023, after testing the waters in Asia, that Lemon8 began to be launched in regions such as the United States and the United Kingdom. As a result, it was out of control, and soon after its launch, it rushed to the top 10 of the United States App Store download list, surpassing many old social platforms such as YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook.
Entering the European and American markets, which are surrounded by wolves, Lemon8 follows the consistent style of Chinese Internet companies - throwing money. This includes paying to invite KOLs to settle in, and directing a large number of content to support these KOLs, so as to attract more users to enter. This is the same as Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu and other celebrities invited to settle in.
In addition, TikTok, which was the first to gain a foothold in overseas markets, also gave Lemon8 great support, not only placing a large number of advertisements for Lemon8 on the platform's "Recommended for You", but also supporting TikTok creators to divert traffic to Lemon8 on their personal homepages. Today, TikTok's hashtag about "#Lemon8" has amassed about 4 billion views.
It can be seen that whether it is the operation team, or the investment of resources and funds, Lemon8 does not look like a pilot project that can be abandoned at any time within Bytes, but more like a product with clear goals and sufficient preparation, which is highly expected by the company. Its popularity is more like the result of artificial catalysis.
ByteDance, a popular model manufacturing machine
A more coincidental point in time is that in March 2023, Tik Tok's CEO Zhou Shouzi attended a hearing in the United States Congress and was questioned for 5 hours, which was a life-and-death battle for TikTok. And almost at the same time, Lemon8 began to enter the European and American markets.
(Zhou Shouzi attends a hearing in the United States Congress)
More than two months later, it was reported that Chen Ying, the head of Lemon8, was preparing to move from Shanghai to Singapore and reported to Zhou Shouzi. Since then, TikTok has been revealed to be integrating with Lemon8's social app, and this new partnership will allow users to sync their Lemon8 posts to TikTok and add sounds and music using TikTok's editor.
This also means that Lemon8 is getting closer and closer to Tik Tok, although Lemon8 is still difficult to become a "candidate" for Tik Tok, but Byte's sense of crisis in overseas markets is undoubtedly revealed, and through Lemon8, the company's huge "creation" ability is once again amazing.
In fact, only in the first stop Japan market of Lemon8, ByteDance has successively launched TikTok, CapCut, BuzzVideo and other products, among them, CapCut is also one of the most popular video editing applications in United States, and Lemon8 is Byte's third main application in United States.
Since its inception in 2012, ByteDance seems to be launching new apps all the time. In addition to the two heavyweight products of Toutiao and Douyin, Watermelon Video, Know Chedi, Pipi Shrimp, Feishu, Tomato Novel, Xiaohe Health, Faceu Exciting Meng, Qingyan Camera, and Doubao AI...... A series of popular products occupy almost half of the Internet applications.
Once these application products gain a firm foothold in the domestic market, most of them will be equipped with overseas versions. Looking at the emergence time of a series of products, it is no exaggeration to say that on average, 4-5 phenomenal popular apps come out of ByteDance every year, and it is precisely because of this that this company has long been called "App Factory" in the outside world.
To a certain extent, Byte's "explosive manufacturing" can be summarized into two aspects, one is self-development, and the other is acquisition. Previously, "LatePost" disclosed that ByteDance developed and acquired a large number of projects from 2018 to 2020, that is, during its most rapid growth years, among which there are about 140 apps launched on the App Store, accounting for seventy percent of its establishment.
Among them, ByteDance's self-developed logic is based on the principle of going all out once it succeeds, shutting down decisively once it fails, and immediately turning around and rushing to the next field. "Duoshan" is a typical example, the birth of Duoshan was given high hopes to challenge WeChat, but after a period of time online, it did not create much spark, so ByteDance quickly stopped further investment, and instead used its failure experience to embed social attributes within Douyin.
In terms of acquisitions, TikTok's predecessor musical.ly is also a typical example. Although in 2023, the pace of ByteDance's investment and acquisition has slowed down a lot, but it still acquired 100% of the shares of Xingtu APP for millions of yuan in March, and before that, ByteDance itself had a number of popular applications in the field of pictures, such as Faceu and Qingyan Camera.
It is also under this logic that a series of popular applications have emerged one after another, creating this super unicorn with a valuation of nearly 2 trillion.
Xiaohongshu and bytes will eventually have a battle
Looking back on the past few years, ByteDance has never given up on Xiaohongshu's "grass" market.
As early as 2018, when Xiaohongshu bucked the trend and reached 150 million users, Byte saw the potential of this market and quickly launched the grass planting community app "New Grass" in this year.
The definition of new grass is simple and straightforward: "a grass-growing community that young people are visiting". However, it is precisely because of the simple and crude launch method of Xincao that it directly continues the product logic of Toutiao's strong algorithm and strong recommendation, and Toutiao's users are more inclined to browse content than publish content, and in the end, Xincao ended without a problem in 2019.
Since then, three years have passed, and ByteDance has launched a new application "Ke Song". This time, the croissant no longer relies on the headline system, but migrates from the content of Douyin, and refers to the browsing mode of Xiaohongshu to a certain extent, but the video mode of Douyin and the graphics and text are not fully integrated, and the croissant has no choice but to die after only 20 days of being online.
Bytes hasn't given up yet. In April 2023, "Youpersimmon", which focuses on graphics and texts, will be launched, which is a new application launched by upgrading the Toutiao Search App. Youpersimmon is positioned as a community-based product of life experience, which is almost made according to the template of Xiaohongshu. At this time, the number of Xiaohongshu users has exceeded 260 million, and it has begun to vigorously develop e-commerce.
Defeat after defeat, defeat after defeat. Although the three products did not see much effect, Lemon8 unexpectedly ushered in an outbreak overseas, and was ridiculed by an industry insider close to Byte as "flowering inside the wall and fragrant outside the wall".
In contrast, Xiaohongshu's overseas market has not been smooth.
In the past three years, Xiaohongshu has launched a number of independent apps overseas. These include Uniik Fashion Community, which was released in 2021, Takib, an outdoor living community in 2022, and habU, a beauty community. There are also S'More, a lifestyle community that has entered the Japan market, Spark for the Southeast Asian market, and Catalog, a home sharing platform that has entered the European and American markets......
They did not continue the success of Xiaohongshu in China, either tepidly or hastily shut down after a few months. Interestingly, these APPs customized for overseas countries and regions have not yet been popularized by Xiaohongshu.
Xiaohongshu first became a big hit in the Chinese circle. Nowadays, many posts on the platform can see the positioning of each country in the comments and evaluations. It is said that in areas where there are many international students and Chinese, foreign merchants have also applied for the registration of Xiaohongshu numbers, and although they cannot read Chinese, they still clumsily use translation software to post content.
In recent years, when Baidu, Weibo, Tieba and other social and search apps have gradually disappeared, a group of people are turning to Xiaohongshu from various platforms. Some interesting changes are happening: the post-90s generation who "found Baidu with problems" many years ago is now accustomed to looking up strategies on Xiaohongshu; And the young men who used to circulate in Hupu have also opened accounts on Xiaohongshu.
The living community that was originally positioned as a young woman has slowly broken down the barriers of age, gender, industry and interests, and job search experience posts, industry topics, and even social issues have begun to appear here. Since last year, many investors have sighed, "Recently, more and more VCs have posted on Xiaohongshu, and this has become a resource exchange field." ”
To a certain extent, this is also the reason why ByteDance has repeatedly ended, and whether it is Byte's test of the waters in China, or Lemon8's encounter with Xiaohongshu abroad, the two sides may eventually come to a day of short-term encounter.
At this time, the smoke of gunpowder had already filled the sky over the factory.