Creator of Douyin / TikTok: How We Created A Product with A Billion Views A Day in 18 Months: Part 2
Featuring Kelly Nan Zhang, now ByteDance China CEO.
Kelly (Nan) Zhang at Hundun University, February 2018.
Tech Buzz: If you’re here and you haven’t read Part 1 of this presentation, then you need to do that right now! But as a refresher … The below speech by Kelly (Nan) Zhang, original head of Douyin (domestic China TikTok) and as of March 2020, the CEO of ByteDance’s China business, took place in late February of 2018 as part of the offline expert sharing curriculum of popular professional development company Hundun University. Kelly joined ByteDance in 2014, and was in charge of Neihanduanzi, ByteDance’s earliest product and its first success before Toutiao. In her new capacity as CEO of ByteDance China, reporting directly to Zhang Yiming, she is “responsible for the company’s products in the China market, leading product management and operation, marketing, and partnerships for Toutiao, Douyin, Xigua, Toutiao Search and other products and services.”
Just as we have done with ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming’s extensive interview at Tsinghua University (broken into Parts 1, 2, 3, 4), we’ve taken a transcript of the video and translated and annotated / contextualized it for your learning and understanding. Picking up from where we left off last time, Kelly had explained that after much research and user testing, the team decided to go with the following four “keywords” for Douyin: full screen HD display format, music, special effects filters, and algorithmic recommendations. Then, after the initial product, named A.me, didn’t take off, they also decided on a new, more descriptive name - Douyin, meaning vibrato.
PS Mega thanks to Pandaily editor Lu Zhao for the translation! You can learn more about her work here.
FULL TRANSCRIPT, PART II
Kelly: After we named the product, we must give this product a good “skin” and a good “soul.” The skin refers to a good UI design. Well, many companies put a lot of effort into UI design but we felt it needed to be more than that. We believe a good product should be alive. Yes, it should be able to grow on its own. So we need to endow it with a personality or style in the beginning. We also thought a lot about this. We wanted to show Douyin’s soul in every aspect such as icon, UI design, marketing and television commercial so as to plant an image of Douyin in users’ minds. I think this is also very important. Let’s take a look at our logo. I remember when this logo was just designed and we were promoting the product, some people said our logo made them dizzy. It’s because the icon is not just a simple image. It has some visual principles behind it. The story is that this icon was designed by a young man born in 1992. Our employees are all quite young, yes, the average age is 20-something. He loves rock music, post-rock. Once he went to a rock concert and he suddenly had an idea. The combination of light and shadow at the concert seemed a good fit for Douyin, he thought. So he designed a musical note icon based on Yin [the Chinese word for music] and added this jittery feel to it. He also did a small experiment on the logo. He turned it into a GIF by imposing an animated electromagnetic wave effect on the logo. Then he cut into multiple frames, and selected the clearest frame. The color naturally shown on the back is the blue and green you can see now. It seems moving even though it’s actually still. We put the icon on the top of Douyin’s name. [Kelly shows a screen capture of the latest version of the app.] So you can see that by using the same colors and wave effect throughout, the UI design of Douyin is consistent.
This graphic of how Douyin’s famous logo was created and selected has become the stuff of legend in Chinese graphic designer circles.
Moving on, I want to talk about creativity and technology. You can also pursue the ultimate in these areas. At Douyin we always think about how we can be more creative and tech-driven than others, how to delight our users. I will show you a short video, because Douyin is a short video product, I think you can feel it more vividly by watching a short video. Before I play it, I want to ask you to notice some details in the video. The user, how does he shoot a Douyin video? How does he look like off versus on camera? What techniques did he use? Where did he put his hand? Also, we made a special phone holder to help him shoot. Now let’s watch this video. [She shows a video of someone who’s obviously very experienced shooting a Douyin video and what the clip looks like afterwards.]
You can see his way of shooting a Douyin video. We joke that if you see a person shooting this way in public, he must be doing a Douyin video because his range of motion is so big. But the visual effect is actually quite good because it has a lot of cutaway shots. And you can see his finger was tapping the screen or sliding on the screen when he was shooting. To make it easier for users, we made a handy shooting button that no matter how your hand moves, the shooting button will follow your hand. This small detail is particularly important. By watching how users shoot Douyin videos and talking to them, we created the function. Actually we struggled for a long time whether to choose a long-press or click shooting function. We did a lot of internal discussions, even arguments. We found that both long-press and click shooting functions are used in the industry. So we decided to go with the characteristics of Douyin itself. For example, in the early days of Douyin, users liked to use the front camera to record themselves. So there are all kinds of high angles shots in Douyin videos. If the person shoots by one hand, there will be a pause in between if he clicks start and stop. You know people improvise around the music on Douyin. So users who pursue perfection will be bothered by the short pause in the shooting process. We analyzed a lot of actual cases like this, we even invited some users to the company to try different shooting functions. We found that both functions have advantages and disadvantages, depending on what users need at different stages of the product. For example, we always used the long-press function in the early days, but then in the middle and later stages we’ve included both functions as more users are using the rear camera. Douyin also supports countdown shooting, in order to satisfy users, for example, if I put my phone away and shoot myself dancing from a distance, the countdown function can help me shoot a full-frame and better present my performance. So you have to do a lot of research and surveys on users, observe actual shooting circumstances in life, and then you can think about how to meet these demands of users in a better and more inclusive way.
Tech Buzz: Nothing in here is surprising, really, especially when as we’ve noted, there was already the success of musical.ly abroad to learn from. Musical.ly, for example, also used the long-press function, although as far as I can tell, it never did make the minor (but valuable?) adjustments like having a moving recording button and also including click shooting. So in that sense, yes, Douyin was pretty obsessive about delighting the user and did in fact make very specific optimizations that were tailor made for its users. Please correct me if I’m wrong since I only have “how to” videos to go by now that the app has been permanently sunsetted.
Kelly: Next, I want to show you more creative videos with some special effects, including 3D hair coloring, dancing machines, AR stickers and panoramic stickers. We developed these features with our AI Lab team. We often combine our panoramic stickers with TV shows. Or users can use it to change their background if the shooting environment is not ideal. These actually require a lot of technology, such as face recognition, body keypoints detection, 3D rendering, which are all based on deep learning and image recognition. Because we made many technological innovations and special effects like this, Douyin was the number one [downloaded] app on the App Store chart at the end of 2017. When you’re pursuing perfection in both your products and the technology, you will definitely delight your users. This is actually very important. Next, let’s talk about how to pursue perfection in operations.
Tech Buzz: The AI Lab is a hugely important part of ByteDance and was officially founded in 2016. It’s led by Wei-Ying Ma, who joined in February 2017 and was previously Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia where he worked for nearly 16 years on web search and mining research. Because of its focus on practical problem solving versus fundamental research (publications are not a KPI, unlike at other companies, ie Baidu), it’s not always so easy to figure out what they’re working on and the progress they’ve made. As Kelly highlighted though, the product teams work with the AI Lab on a regular basis, which is again, not always the case with other Chinese internet companies. Besides making technology that allowed Douyin to push out nifty AR special effects, the AI Lab’s work also goes into information consumption and creation, of course, as well as recruiting top AI talent and on developing technologies for ByteDance’s “next 2-5 years.” If you’re technically inclined, here’s an example of a paper that was published in 2019 on deep reinforcement learning techniques applied to advertising technology that seems to have been tested on Douyin with some success.
Kelly: This was a challenge we did called “Can’t shake off this single dog.” [See below for explanation.] Challenges are an interesting feature of Douyin, not sure if you’ve used or seen it. The operations team hopes the challenge feature can help users produce videos. Users are often confused when they use a short video product. I believe you may also be confused even if you don’t shoot short videos. The main question is: what I should shoot? How do I shoot it? So we often launch some challenges to solve this problem. When we design special effects, stickers, or new features, we don’t just innovate for the sake of innovation. We have to think about what users will do with those features after we launch them. This is also a pursuit of perfection. Taking a step back, we should create new features from an operator's perspective, and also include considerations on how to launch them. Let’s take a look at this sticker. Users have done a lot of videos around it. A perfect campaign not only guides users to use a product, but also inspires users’ creativity so that they may create something we didn’t even expect. I believe that when you use Douyin, you must be amazed by all the different innovative ideas you see from our users. I’m certainly deeply impressed.
Tech Buzz: The campaign Kelly is talking about here is one where an AR dog’s face covers your face, unless you “throw” it onto another person by shaking your head vigorously in their direction. What does this have to do with being single? Well, in Chinese internet slang, being a singleton is 单身狗, which are the words for “single dog,” which is why this dog sticker became associated with being single (if you didn’t participate in the challenge and “throw” the dog elsewhere then you were doomed to be single for the next year and be a single dog I guess). This campaign ran around November 2017, and was supposedly started by a user on Douyin, not the Douyin team itself, as had been the case with the “shower dance” challenge earlier in the year that Kelly will talk about later in this presentation. By this time, actually, a bit over a year after its official launch, analysts were remarking at how Douyin creators were already initiating their own challenges, a sign of a hyper-engaged community. I think what Kelly is trying to highlight here is that this specific filter was designed with specific “operating” goals in mind: to show off and educate users about Douyin’s AR tech, to encourage users to include their friends in their videos, to lower the barrier to creation to almost nothing (a vigorous shake of the head), all the while using something that is easily meme-able.
The Douyin “can’t shake off this single dog” challenge was so popular it was covered on TV. Over 100,000 people participated in the challenge.
Kelly: Next, let’s talk about marketing. When your products, technology and operations are all doing well, the next question is how to better promote this product with marketing. This is also very very important. And you’d hope to convey Douyin’s characteristics, soul and style during the marketing. Therefore, you actually have a lot of things to think about. I will share two cases with you, which became WeChat sensations as soon as we launched them. One is the “shaking famous paintings” campaign, and the other is “shaking cash.” We actually discussed this idea of famous paintings for a long time. As you can see, these famous paintings are hundreds of years old, and they should be just lying in the museum. But we “invited them out” and combined them with Douyin’s features such as camera movements, rhythm and quick scene switches, which was a big contrast with the paintings and so delighted our users a lot. This campaign and special effects became a sensation on WeChat in one day. The Douyin account we released at that time got millions of followers within two or three days. The number of Douyin’s active users was not as high as it is now. The other campaign is a shaking banknote and performed by a Douyin influencer. You can see here the banknote is “battling” with the influencer. So what does good marketing actually bring to users? We have been discussing and thinking about this question ourselves. We believe that good marketing actually brings a sense of identity to users, which means when an ad will inspire your curiosity about the product when you see it. Only if the ad stimulates users’ curiosity, can it improve the download or conversion rate of our product. So we integrate our products’ characteristics to make creative marketing. At the same time your product has to be able to keep those users attracted by the special effects, so be sure to use marketing methods in accordance with your product’s characteristics. Thus, I think the sense of identity is the ultimate goal of product marketing.
Tech Buzz: Versus competing products at the time, which were more focused on comedic or beautifying features, Douyin really just stuck to its very modern, “electrifying,” high-energy vibe. To show off those qualities, animating static, two-dimensional, “boring” images in unexpected ways seemed like a good, memorable contrast. At the time, WeChat hadn’t yet blocked content from Douyin’s Official Account from being shared (that happened in May 2018), so a lot of these activities were actually in the form of WeChat marketing, as that was still a strong customer acquisition channel. (Eventually, of course, they would become real nemeses, as we’ve covered on Tech Buzz.) The famous paintings campaign Kelly talks about was released as an HTML5 page on WeChat in July 2017, quickly going viral and driving downloads, and the shaking cash campaign was in September 2017, following much the same playbook.
The Douyin famous paintings campaign, which featured the Mona Lisa, Van Gogh, Napoleon and Rubens’ Susanne Fourment.
Kelly: Finally, I want to talk about users. Users have greatly impacted us in the past year. We believe that users are not just users, they can become the owner of the product, so their opinions are particularly important. I will share two cases in a moment to show how our users help this product grow. Here are some users in the early days who are still active on Douyin. One of them is Mr. Xue, the boy in the middle of the screen. I remember we had just launched Douyin one or two months at that time and we were not very happy with the product. We chose some of our users to try the product and give us feedback. They gave Douyin tons of suggestions and ideas, but also dissed us every day. One of them who impressed me most was Mr. Xue. He was studying in Canada. Because of the time difference, when we were at work he was sleeping, and when he got up we were sleeping. To give us feedback, he stayed up all night for days to wait for our product and tech teams to come to work. We spent almost a month back and forth dealing with a difficult problem - synchronizing the speech and video. Because users perform around the music on Douyin, the speech-video synchronization is really important. If users can’t keep up with the key points of the music when shooting, it is very difficult to have a good visual presentation in the end. So speech-video synchronization is really important. We communicated with him for a month about this one issue and Mr. Xue finally agreed we fixed it. Though it’s just a tiny detail, we’ve won tons of users because of it. People turned to Douyin because we perfected this feature. Even now when we discuss and reflect on this, we all agree this function was crucial. This is also a pursuit of perfection.
Another challenge we did, not sure if you know, was called shower dance. It was super popular in March 2017, not only on Douyin but other social media platforms. The idea was actually from one of our users who brainstormed with our operations team to create a challenge that attracted more people. She also created the sound effects with our sound specialists. I’ll share with you a video later about how our sound specialists work. If not for her we won’t be able to know that users care a lot about background music and sound effects. Her name is Liu Xizi. Another active user Xiamu specially designed dance moves for this. I think it is our sound specialist, Liu Xizi and Xiamu who made this shower dance so impressive. You can search the video on Douyin, it's very interesting.
Tech Buzz: I cannot explain why this challenge was so popular, because it just involves a set of hand gestures that you complete sitting down set to an unintelligible song. And yet, it was. Such are the wonders of the internet. What’s left out here is that there are a few other stories floating around about that same time (March 2017) which happens to be when Douyin began to see a surge in downloads and come into the public consciousness. (You can see this pretty clearly in the download graph below.) One of them involves a viral “tweet” (retweeted 7300 times): a famous (stand-up) comedian responded to a Weibo post where someone had strung together two funny videos from a Douyin female creator who bore an uncanny resemblance to him, and whom Chinese netizens were convinced was actually the comedian himself. (It was not.) Yet others have attributed it to the collaboration with artist Tiger Hu (6mm Weibo followers), one of the first to officially promote his music with Douyin, in early April, 2017. While I’m sure these things helped, I don’t see them as having the level of impact that was needed to launch Douyin into the stratosphere. I think it really was, as Kelly mentions later, when cumulative improvements in the product reached a certain “delight threshold” that gave it the extra oxygen to sprint ahead -- and getting lucky with a few key creative campaigns for the initial momentum boost, of course that helped as well.
Douyin download data. The app was launched in Sept. 2016 and had minimal downloads until Feb. / Mar. 2017, when it took off.
Kelly: So we must not only analyze data of products and users, but also maintain close communication and contact with these users. This is actually one of the important things we’ve learned from Douyin. I will show you some videos later about Douyin gatherings in various cities across the country. Some of these gatherings were held by our operations team, and some are initiated by Douyin influencers. So far, almost every week, there are some gatherings held by Douyin users. We ask our product managers and operations team to participate each time. Because I think to know our users, we can’t only depend on questionnaires, but more importantly, we should be part of the community. Only in that way you can really know your users. I believe the best way to discover the needs of users is not questionnaires or user data analysis. Those standardized methods are used by all companies and their product managers. But to really understand users, you should get involved in their life, see how they use your product. And you should see not only one case, but many cases. You should know how they use your product at different times and during different occasions. Then think about how to upgrade your product accordingly to meet their needs. So it is very important to be part of your users and see how they use the product in real life. Sometimes you need to create opportunities to have close contact with your users. For example, in the early days, we held some small parties or other events for Beijing users because we’re based in Beijing. Users would come to our office. Sometimes we would also walk into their lives, such as when some active users would hold gatherings and we’d hope they would invite us to chat and play together. So I think it’s also very important to create this kind of opportunity to approach users.
Tech Buzz: I think by this point of the presentation you can tell China has come a long way from the days of top-down product decision making that celebrates manager intuition versus user feedback. If you were not aware that was a thing … that definitely used to be the norm, maybe a decade ago, when founders would unilaterally make decisions on the product based upon experience and without much input from the team. That was before people understood customer development and lean startup methodology, of course. And ByteDance is all about these things. Anyway, Kelly is actually advocating for some user co-creation here, not just feedback, which is intense to say the least and not easy to manage! I don’t know how many Douyin-related events the team still goes to but just a casual search will reveal that there are a ton of these all over China. What Kelly didn’t talk about here because it isn’t related to building product is the massive galas that Douyin and other apps now all hold, often in conjunction with the big TV networks and featuring A-list celebrities. Finally, I hope this talk gives you a good idea of how the product manager position in China has been quickly professionalized. One of my favorite and probably less well-known Chinese communities to visit whenever I’m trying to understand a new startup is Woshipm, which means “I am a PM” in Chinese, and which has a very dense concentration of articles (of varying thoughtfulness) written by PMs on different products. If I had infinite resources, I would love to have translated some of the most interesting pieces into English!
Stay tuned for Part 3 … !
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