Ten months after the launch, developers have been on a roller coaster ride. Now it’s finally catching on.

Article | sunran 闫浩

“The original price is 39,000, now a set only 19,000.”

This is not an INFomercial, it’s actually from a small program fair in Guangzhou.

In the conference room of more than 200 people, the people on the stage were trying to instill a concept — just like following every traffic bonus of the Internet, enterprises must make small programs in the future, and should have one for everyone and develop it as soon as possible. The audience is sitting more from the traditional field of small and medium-sized business owners, although this new thing a blank, but do not want to miss this opportunity, so as not to “regret too late”.

Usually, after such an exhibition, the sales company that organizes the event can take 50 orders, with an average price of 50,000 yuan per ticket. These are a group of keen speculators in the outsourcing development business, who create small programs made up of a buzzword and a simple set of templates, with few technical barriers, that can be sold by hand.

Qunapp founder Yang Fangxian knows of more than a dozen such companies in Guangzhou alone. “Their business has even spread to second – and third-tier cities, but they are the first to make money from small programs.”

Although wechat focuses on cracking down on such companies, from another perspective, the emergence of speculators often means that a product form begins to generate huge development needs and user needs. Larger companies are willing to spend three and a half million on small programs, and smaller companies can afford even a few tens of thousands to catch up. This is very similar to the scene when the rush to build the station.

This is a sign that the applet is hot.

In May, nearly half a year after the launch of the micro channel small program platform, the circle began to appear one PV(page views) over ten million myth. Sleep-aid audio app Xiaomeng has more than 10 million users, while audio album Xiaonianggao has more than 20 million users. Friends impressions’ first phenomenal mini app, chat anonymously, attracted 17 million users in its first five hours. This company because of successive manufacturing anonymous chat, friends guess, walk heart chat, group impression several popular style, become the circle of popular style benchmark.

“Do a fire a, PV can be tens of millions.” “One developer said enviously to 36 Krypton.

Li Haoyang, co-founder of Friend Impression, is now discounting millions of PV. Every time a new small program is developed, before it goes online, his team will bet with PV value within the team. Only when PV exceeds ten million in a single day is regarded as a success.

This allows investors to small procedures of the attitude has also undergone a huge change, in July this year as the boundary point, investors from wait-and-see to seize the head, began to intensive. Small app teams at the head of the niche have been trawled by VCS, and they have a lot in common: a team of 10 or so people, millions of angel investors, and tens of millions of users in a few months.

Before May, the founder Ru Haibo had to take the initiative to find financing and explain to each other what small programs are. However, most of the initiators we meet now are investors. Zou Zou, the founder of Little Sleep, has also seen seven or eight investors approach him in recent months.

And that’s just the beginning. The fast-changing rules have made this a roller-coaster year for small developers. The environment seems to be getting better, but there are still many unanswered questions: How to use the ecological dividend of wechat? How to stay hot after becoming a hit? How to avoid stepping on wechat’s red line?

Even the creator of this river’s lake, wechat, is still walking on thin ice.

The birth of ten million level PV

On September 21, 2016, wechat opened the application for internal testing of mini programs.

Dai Yusen, who was still in Jumei, wrote a note to the product manager group immediately after hearing the news the next day. The general idea is that small programs must be paid attention to. There may be a series of scenarioalized applications in the future. He had a discussion with Chen ou, and concluded that “despite the limitations of miniprogram not being able to blur search and post to group chats, if it opens up in the future, it will be very good and Tencent will not give up on itself. But if you don’t do it now, you’ll probably be stuck later.”

The mission of small program is to make up for what Zhang xiaolong failed to achieve on the service number – to provide services directly with wechat ecology. Developers are keenly aware that this is the biggest opportunity since the wechat account, which has attracted at least 200,000 developers in the six months since its launch on January 9. But many were initially pessimistic about its prospects.

A week after the launch, luo Zhenyu, founder of The company, posted a message on wechat that sparked a lot of discussion: “We decided not to do it. We know what a applet is. Haha, but I can’t say.” On January 13, get Plus applets stopped operating.

No matter how to do, at least Ruhaibo has been waiting for this opportunity for a long time.

Back in 2013, the new father became obsessed with taking pictures of his children and decided to make an audio album. When this idea landed, Ru Haibo decided to give up the form of App, using the public account as the carrier to do service tools in wechat ecology. At that time, the prospect of the public number is still vague, dare to All in wechat product developers and see more.

His judgment is that the wechat ecosystem at the end of 2014 already has the basic conditions to do a heavy interactive application, which is a bit like the mid-2000s, flash, browser and web technology upgrades caused client applications to start migrating to the web. In 2017, the emergence of small programs to make wechat block soil more mature, he is more feel that the era of wechat has come, “wechat own identity, the use of wechat interface even user registration and login links are eliminated, the threshold to reach the user is significantly reduced.”

As it turns out, the small program based on wechat does give xiaoniangao public account and App ecology can not give something. Xiao Niangao’s main users are over 50 years old, who are obviously not the most sensitive group to the Internet or new things. It would be much more difficult to attract new users in App scenarios that need to be downloaded.

At the end of May 2017, Ru haibo conducted an experiment to bind xiao Niangao to the official account. The seamless flow between the official account and the mini program quickly expanded the user base of Xiao Niangao. Within a month, the number of xiao Niangao users rose from 10 million to 20 million.

“There are historical patterns that are repeated with every new platform. Small programs like microblogging and public accounts in those days, the earliest capture value bonus is a group of similar applications: do tests, do spoof, write jokes, and install force class artifact.” Dayson told 36 Krypton.

As a tool, the rice cakes quickly become popular because they tap into the social scene of friends sharing photo albums. The products that are most popular are those with strong social attributes that are good at spreading the word, such as anonymous chat. The viral spread caused by such products in wechat ecology is unimaginable in the previous native App scene.

Anonymous chat online on March 22, May 18 update to the fifth version of the suddenly popular. This is an application to share in the circle of friends and attract friends to leave anonymous messages, which is in touch with people’s psychology of private curiosity to others. Li didn’t plan to promote the product at the time. He posted the anonymous chat to a wechat group of 20 people, five of whom reposted the product. Five hours later, Mr Li saw the number of users hit 17 million.

Three months later, a similar outbreak occurred with the tipping app Gizan. This is an app that generates and shares its own appreciation code based on a specific scene, and others can scan the code directly to reward the app. From 19 o ‘clock suddenly spread to the early morning, to like the small program PV quickly broke through one million.

Such a result, greatly unexpected to praise CEO Deng Jibin. The influx of a million users in those five hours came from the inadvertent actions of one original user. At that time, an investor shared a “like” in a wechat group of entrepreneurs in the TO-B field at a venture capital summit. Soon, to praise the Internet to wash the circle of friends.

Deng Jiebin post analysis, “wechat ecological users have obvious circle layer, the product to penetrate into different circle layer is more difficult, but in the same circle layer users are easy to spread through the product coverage, suddenly burst.”

Explosion makes people jealous, naturally, more and more people are asking each other, how to make explosion?

The entrepreneurs 36kr interviewed all agreed that the key to taking advantage of wechat’s ecological dividend to create a small app that would explode is to naturally integrate product functions with social links and sharing actions.

Many people see the friend impression as a case study worth reading. Within six months, the company created five mini apps: Anonymous Chat, Group Impressions, Heart-to-heart Chat, and Poor Dad and His Friends guess. Both anonymous Chat and friends guessing your friends’ tastes through movies have become popular.

“The most important state of mind for users in social networking is to show off and solve loneliness, so the way to obtain traffic in wechat is to rely on various props to stimulate people’s sense of showing off and solve loneliness.” Li haoyang believes that showing off, loneliness, chivalry and competition constitute the key psychology that stimulates users to spread.

However, in the wechat ecology, explosive money is not uncommon. In August 2014, a small game named “Surround Neurocat” went viral on Wechat moments. PV exceeded 10.26 million in 48 hours after launch. A month later, the team built on this and created an App called “Neurocat’s Daily” that added more gameplay. But in wechat ecology, its life cycle has come to an end.

“One of the awkwardness is that there are not many small programs to find good scenarios, and some products become popular overnight, but it is difficult for users to precipitate commercial value.” Yang fangxian told 36kr.

Run out and go, explosive how to precipitation users?

The second stage question every developer needs to answer is — how do you stay popular after you become a hit? How to precipitate users?

When wechat officially launched mini programs on January 9, the first developers to get in reaped the first traffic driven by curiosity. Xiaomao, an audio app for sleeping, saw 700,000 users on its first day of launch, with more than 4 million PV users in an hour.

However, the overjoyed developers did not expect, and then ushered in as long as 3 months of cold, as well as wechat entanglement and game. Until the end of March this year, restrained wechat did not open the entrance of fuzzy and keyword search, group sharing and so on. For many developers without secondary trigger users and social communication attributes, small programs have really become used up and gone, and users do not even turn back.

In fact, those three months, wechat team was also very difficult. In February and March, when the flow of small programs is less favorable, wechat saw a sharp drop in the number of small programs. Yinian’s founder, Huang Yanbo, remembers that more than 2,000 users flooded in on the first day of its launch in January, but it began to decline, leaving just over 100 users by Spring Festival. This is a small program for sharing photo albums based on friend relationship. By introducing male gods and goddesses who have more than 1,000 to 1,500 wechat friends in colleges and universities, it has gained seed users, and now the cumulative page view has reached 30 million.

More anxious is the tool properties of low-frequency application developers, since there is almost no volume coming in, can maintain stable natural growth is a minority. This shows that the mini-program ecosystem didn’t really come alive during those three months.

Wechat frequently searches for self-growing teams through background data. Zou Zou remembers that the wechat mini program team asked her why she could maintain stable data growth in a few months when wechat did not provide resource support, and what ways wechat should open as a platform to cash in and attract developers.

“What’s unique about the nap is that everyone has some sort of sleep disturbance, and it’s a high-frequency, need-intensive scenario.” This is Zou Zou’s answer.

Unlike native apps, which rely only on App stores in channels, small programs are closely related to wechat’s open interface and entrance in terms of distribution actions and even functional integrity. In the first few months of miniprogram launch, the incomplete infrastructure also affected the product experience of users.

Now, when Xiaomeng is turned on, the audio can play continuously for half an hour. However, due to the influence of wechat’s framework, the audio stops every 5 minutes and needs to be restarted. This situation continues until Xiaomeng has accumulated 4 million users. “It’s devastating for an insomniac, and I don’t know how our users hold up.” Zou zou said.

More important, of course, is traffic.

Entrepreneurs look at the small program of reference, is to cultivate the mi Meng such a huge amount of traffic from the media public number. With this precedent of raising expectations, developers have little patience for small programs. To match the name of wechat’s most important strategic product, little Program’s initial policy is obviously not “stimulating” enough.

“In the first half of the year, small programs looked boring, like chicken ribs. They didn’t exist.” In those three months, developers like Dianping and Mobike, who already have brands and apps, were at the head of the pack. For these developers, applets are mostly a new channel that comes from a placeholder mentality. After all, users are not their own, but it’s ok to have multiple traffic sources. At the time, Li felt that the success of grassroots teams to capture the new social traffic dividend story that the market was expecting accounted for only 10% of the market. A lot of developers around me are putting projects on hold.

The real change happened at the end of March, when wechat finally relented and began to add diversion channels to small programs, open up more functions, and even acquiesced in the purchase of virtual goods in wechat to support developers’ attempts to cash in.

Only from March 27 to June 3, the small program official announced more than 20 skills and flow entrance, including the nearby store entrance, the public account associated small program diversion, scan the TWO-DIMENSIONAL code to enter the small program and so on. After entering June, the “decentralization” of wechat has been further upgraded, aiming at the group social chain and realization scenes of the core of small programs. Here comes the flashpoint for applets.

June 9, mini program began to support custom keyword search, developers can choose 10 keywords, through the search to guide users into their own mini program;

At the end of July, wechat opened small program keyword search in soyizuo;

In early August, a new small program entry “Group small program” was set up in the chat information interface of wechat group.

In early September, pilot the “LBS promotion” for nearby small programs, and try to introduce the entrance search mechanism of bidding ranking in the small program ecosystem.

In October Little Sleep restarted a previously discontinued paid-for feature in the mini program. Xiaomeng tried a paid program briefly in February, and Zou remembers it working well. “The products were priced from 1.99 yuan, 3.99 yuan to 6.99 yuan,” zou said. “We could make three to four thousand dollars a day.” But wechat’s taboo operating rules at the time also prohibited in-app purchases of virtual goods, and the experiment lasted only a short week. In July and August, Zou zou suddenly found that wechat was no longer resistant to such attempts.

With several key traffic channels open, developers have confidence in applets. According to several small program entrepreneurs interviewed by 36kr, user data has been growing rapidly since June. Tens of millions of PV explosion also began to emerge in the same period.

According to Aladdin, a small program statistics platform, total traffic in the third quarter of this year tripled from the first quarter.

But developers want more. So far, of the more than 40 entrances and capabilities opened by wechat, only four or five have attracted the most attention from developers: QR codes, group chat, public accounts and search. For now, developers are only hoping that wechat will open up moments for sharing, especially for products whose functions are rooted in sharing.

“With the open circle of friends and favorites, users feel that our product has all the functions, or it cannot meet their needs.” Ru Haibo, CEO of Xiao Niangao, estimated that reducing sharing on moments would mean cutting traffic sources by at least half. “For example, if you cut a product in half with 120 percent transmission, you only have 60 percent transmission. That’s strong attenuation. How much harder is it? “Small apps should at least be treated the same as apps. In the past, all h5 apps could share moments.”

These developers have seen the rise of wechat business in the circle of friends in the drainage of high efficiency, from a single point to the entire circle of friends. Of course, wechat has also seen it, but what impresses them more is the miasma of small advertisements. Therefore, wechat retains maximum restraint on the opening of moments.

Zhang Xiaolong “use namely go” of view, since circle a definition for small program, also was to give the developer guidance and advice in advance. That means wechat is aiming to provide services, rather than maximizing the amount of time users spend in the mini program.

Industry figures are starting to back him up.

“Little Sleep retention must be in the top 10 in the industry, but I can tell you that it’s probably not a third of the number of apps.” In another seemingly contradictory statistic, The little Sleep App has racked up 7 million users in its first six months, more than the App has in two years.

This means that the difference between applets and apps is much more than just two traffic channels. Small apps can give you a lot of traffic, but it’s much harder to get users to settle than native apps.

There is no lack of small program on the market to see the play, running to dig wechat flow to the entrepreneurs. As apps become more expensive to acquire, a large number of gold prospectors simply see applets as a newly open channel of traffic. The failed experiment intensified developers’ frustration with small programs. The essence of this contradiction is the twist of the old App flow logic and small program flow logic in thinking.

Some developers hope wechat will come under pressure to compromise old traffic logic. But they were wrong about one thing. The rules of the game are always set by the pioneers. It soon became clear who would win, arm or leg.

The sense of crisis under the iron hand and the mind of wechat

After the anonymous chat went online, Li haoyang posted a message of high morale on his circle of friends: “It is a small stone that we threw to the small program to ask for directions. The real biological weapons and nuclear bombs are still behind us. The post was dated May 18, 2017.

Late that night, wechat Guozhen banned the 17 million PV mini program for “inducing sharing.”

After the media interview, Li Haoyang with “desperate” to describe the mood at that time.

As early as before the emergence of small programs, friends impression made a variety of H5 explosive models have been killed by the micro envelope more than 20 times, until Tencent investment, the situation has improved.

Titles are a developer’s worst nightmare. Every month, Huang would chat with his wechat friends to find out what was being checked and what was being blocked, so that he could prepare accordingly to avoid being shot. Pornography, inducing sharing and disturbing images are now recognized by machines and blocked on the platform.

Another growing sense of crisis is that developers are worried that the wechat platform, now acting as a referee, will personally end up playing football with hundreds of thousands of developers.

A group photo album entrepreneur heard from inside wechat that wechat officials plan to make mini programs in each vertical market in order to see what mini programs are like in each industry. He is skeptical of this view, if wechat official small program to do up, it will be the biggest competitor in the segment of the industry.

“They can play on their own. Who else will want to play with them?” He was worried, but prepared. “Traffic first, once users store photos in, it’s hard to move them. Wechat has an entry point for traffic, but there is no centralized place for traffic.”

No one knows the micro channel to do small program experiment of the choice and boundary. Predictably, however, developers who are closer to infrastructure features and “big” businesses, such as payments, are closer to the red line.

When applauding small program to praise online, the wechat public account is due to the standoff with Apple, shut down the appreciation function. But reward for the public number media is just need, cut to the point, and associated with the circle of friends for reward play. To praise the heat, right at the right time and place.

Deng Jiabin defined the business of Zan as “non-payment transaction”, “what we want to do is not new media appreciation, but the scene of appreciation service providers. We will build a lot of scenes through products to guide users to appreciate and complete the expression of beautiful emotions, such as the appreciation code for emotional interaction with friends on holidays, the appreciation code for art exhibitions, the appreciation code for waiters in service scenes such as catering and hotels…”

In October this year, wechat released a new feature on IOS 6.5.19, putting mini apps in an awkward position.

The function of wechat appreciation is to generate its own appreciation code and accept rewards from users. Wechat said in an interview with 36kr that the appreciation code is mainly applied to the situation of personal payment, users who need to receive praise, tips and other needs. For example, catering attendants and performance and exhibition authors can turn on the function of appreciation code and set the amount of appreciation and guide language. The appreciation code can be shown in offline scenes, and the admirer can scan the code to complete the payment.

In fact, the original design of appreciation code is offline service, which is actually tangent in wechat’s biggest knot – grab offline traffic.

In the 2016 annual financial report, Tencent mentioned small program like this: “WeChat launched in January in 2017 small programs, believe the future will help us in the” low frequency usage scenarios “provides a deeper broader service, connect more offline services with online users, and the ways to let users have more contact and experience similar features provided by the mobile application in order to improve the mobile application download conversion rate.”

What is noteworthy is the connection between offline services and users. According to the quarterly Monitoring Report on China’s Third-party mobile Payment Market released by Analysys Intelligence in the first quarter of 2017, the transaction scale of China’s third-party mobile payment market reached 1.8091 trillion yuan, among which Alipay accounted for 53.7%, and Tencent’s wechat Pay and Tenpay accounted for 39.51%.

With Alipay into the battle, the growth of online traffic has slowed down, wechat Pay hope is to rely on small programs to leverage from offline business and online transactions of nearly 1 billion months live. From the opening of “nearby stores” to the release of “store mini programs”, the functional framework launched by wechat clearly focuses on stimulating the ability of offline retail developers.

A person close to the wechat team commented on 36kr: “Tencent is a strong business team with very creative ideas and strategic products, but these people actually do not understand to B business, do not understand the needs of merchants and the market, so the process of promoting small programs is not smooth.”

The market’s high expectations, and the importance of small programs to Tencent, wechat team brought no small pressure. Twice a week to update the opening capacity, plus ma Huateng and Zhang Xiaolong platform endorsement for many times…… Behind the unprecedented treatment, wechat is anxiously looking for ways to open up the situation for small programs.

“Their pain is riding the tiger,” said the person close to wechat, a product that must not fail. Because if it fails, “Tencent is just Tencent, wechat is just wechat, and it’s going to hit the ceiling.”

New media operators directly feel wechat’s sense of crisis.

According to a report released by the third-party data platform Houst, a total of 290,000 articles were sent through wechat’s official account in the first quarter of this year, with 15.1 billion users. However, the average opening rate was only 4.63 percent, less than 5 percent, which is a cut in half from 10 percent in 2016.

Wechat needs small programs to renew the life of the public account. Seeing this trend, feiyan, a small program development platform, started to make small program tools based on official accounts. Zhang Xiang, founder of feiyan, said, “Official accounts have been working for five years and are very mature. But many public accounts to absorb a large number of fans there is a great problem of cash, or fans are not active precipitation.”

In the past, the public account opened the situation for wechat in the flow, but it has not been extended to the realization of the closed loop. In July, it opened the function of editing small program advertisement card in the background of the public account, which can replace the soft picture in the article of the public account before, and click one step to jump to the commodity purchase interface in the form of small program. One developer told 36kr that the open rate of the widget ads is 10 times higher than the original image ads.

Wechat saw that small programs complement the wechat ecosystem, leveraging the huge space for commercialization. This is why Tencent must do small procedures.

The source of developers’ worries, however, comes from the uncertainty of the rules of small program games. Wechat every experimental action, all affect the whole body, latent efforts in vain.

Small App developers who don’t have an App and don’t plan to build one are in a particularly awkward position. With 20 million users, Ru haibo still can’t tell where the mini program will go in the future. “Wechat is the master of the ecosystem. Developers have to follow or give up.”

For those who have status, small programs have been upgraded from testing water to gambling. Risk and opportunity coexist.

At the very least, this shows that today’s applets are no longer a backwater.

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