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In China, “it’s not easy to get a real one night stand,” he says.Īfter Tang made a comparison to Tinder and Snapchat, I asked Wang what company Momo wanted to be like.

Profile tencent china 900b wechat free#

Wang says, “We don’t have charges, whether that’s a good thing or bad thing, because it’s free social network.” He points out the percentage of successful one-nights stands is quite low because it requires high social skills and luck. But many of her Beijing female friends use it to find dates and flirt.Īs a rough estimate, Momo says about 5% of the 900 million messages a month sent across its network are about ‘hooking up.’ But the more than 60% of messages that are traded between two people might be leading to the same discussion. A female Chinese friend of mine was embarrassed when I asked if she used it. When it comes to meeting strangers, men are more aggressive than women-Momo users are 66% percent men to 33% women-but women hold the attention. The networks reflects modern day Chinese society. Wang recommends watching the 2011 documentary Last Train Home to understand how urbanization in China is upending the country’s mores. “When they come to new place, they are totally in a strange world,” he says. Second, he says, the Chinese just aren’t very good at meeting strangers-in the countryside’s small villages, everyone knows everyone-so when migrants come from the countryside to the city, they don’t have the right skills. First, the urbanization rate in China sped up by almost 50% the year Momo started its service, which bolstered an app selling itself as a way to meet strangers. Momo’s success, says co-founder Wang Li, who chose Wanderlust as his English name, is explained by a couple broad themes. Tencent’s WeChat, which actually launched a geo-location service just one day before Momo came online in August 2011, hasn’t overtaken Momo in part because the WeChat is about the privacy of your own social network. At the time, Chinese apps didn’t offer a lot of options to find new friends-existing networks like QQ, Ren Ren, and WeChat were premised around improving relationships you already had. “I don’t know the brand, but Yuri said it was fabulously good,” Tang said.Īfter growing up in the central province of Hunan, Tang spent eight years at the news site of 163.com, one of China’s top Internet portals, eventually running it, before getting the idea for Momo when location apps like Foursquare were gaining popularity. His office chair still has the plastic price tag loop on it and in a recent GQ China profile, he says Yuri Milner, the billionaire Russian VC, shipped him a special whiskey. He has the aura of someone new to it all and excited to be here. On a recent afternoon he’s wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and special-edition Nike sneakers. Tang has the puffy eyes of someone who prefers to work at 1 or 2 in the morning, a time of day he admits to getting his important work done. Instead of avoiding the subject like the company’s public relations aide when I asked her about it, Tang embraces it, comparing Momo to a “combination of Snapchat and Tinder” and pointing out that, yes, some people use it to hook up, but many others log on in hopes of finding friends to share a taxi, get lunch together in the office park, or talk with about everyday topics like parenting in Beijing. Snapchat, too, gained a tawdry reputation of its own in the U.S., which didn’t do much to slow its growth. (Momo has closed 9 million profiles linked to prostitution, spamming and lewdness.) News broke earlier this year that the government’s pornography regulator had warned Momo about some profiles on its network. Momo had gained a reputation for being “a magical tool to get laid,” as Chinese-American comedian Mike Sui put it, as well as “hormone-filled,” China’s state media said. The chat with Spiegel gave Tang a fresh perspective on his company. (The name has no meaning-the founders just wanted something easy to say- but it includes part of the Chinese word for “stranger.”) Just as everyone on Wall Street got to know Alibaba, they might soon be pitching Momo. And the rise of the smartphone has made social apps like Momo indispensable to finding new mates-so much that Momo is planning an IPO that values the company at $3 billion, according to a consultant and Chinese press reports. But so has a more liberal Chinese attitude toward dating and sex. The massive growth of cities in the past few years helped: new migrants want new friends. Momo, a location-based social network allowing users to find new friends nearby, has become one of the most popular apps in China.