Matthew Brennan
28,580 followers
Jiwa Pejuang 
Lagbaja Tamedo 
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Attention Factory is now available in bookstores all across Indiaš„³@WestlandBookssA
"user growth is increasingly all about having the pushiest push notifications."
Some extra work for China's tech regulators šsixthtone.com/news/1008328/yā¦N
Did a short interview for 'Greater China Tech' about Shein, check it outš @grtrchinatechyoutube.com/watch?v=0eUsEjā¦z
Attention Factory is now available in bookstores across China š„³q
#SHEIN 2nd most downloaded shopping app globally in the first half of 2021
Retweeted by Matthew Brennan Deep dive into SHEIN's model here: notboring.co/p/shein-the-tiā¦
#SHEIN's US sales grew 160% in the past 6 months
Source: earnestresearch.com/data-bites/sheā¦
#SHEIN 2nd most downloaded shopping app globally in the first half of 2021
Close to 5% of all Americans are DAILY active users of SHEIN!
New #SHEIN stats leaked today (LatePost)
Daily sales: $70+ million
1 million parcels a day, average order $70
25k employees, looking to add 10k more
Registered users: 120 M
DAU: 30 M With over 1/2 from the US
I finally finished reading "Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance" by @mbrennanchina - very interesting book and pretty relevant to my job. A few takeaways I wanted to share:
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Retweeted by Matthew Brennan Translated this super interesting China data set from a QuestMobile report. Time spent Vs. Online ad revenue.
By contrast #Amazon's 2020 share of US digital ad spend was just 10% (up 52.5% from 2019). Still a long way to go I feel. #AMZN
Retweeted by Matthew Brennan Ultimate China Social Media Marketing Cheatsheet 2021. High res version: assets.kawo.com/KAWO-China-Socā¦ via. @KAWO
Retweeted by Matthew Brennan Apple Wallet users, welcome to China 2017 twitter.com/mbrennanchina/ā¦
One of my most favorite business models coming out of Asia finally has a name: Real Time Retail (per @mbrennanchina). Right now, SHEIN is the poster child of this new biz model. If you donāt know what SHEIN is, ask a teenager -- it's the most downloaded shopping app in the US!
Retweeted by Matthew Brennan Worth watching. Online dating like you've never seen before, from China #yidui @rex_woodbury
Full vid: youtube.com/watch?v=SolXuGā¦
"Our core competency is making money."
- Every Chinese tech company
#SHEIN now valued at $46 billion!
That's half Stripe's latest valuation. Source (Chinese) mp.weixin.qq.com/s/GVipsYtLsM5Kā¦ @packyM
Ground zero in China for live stream sellers is Beixiazhu. This 1 town is filled with 1000's of sellers shipping serious volumes at crazy low prices through live stream. #9.9å
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Retweeted by Matthew Brennan Quoted today in WSJ's latest piece on ByteDance
wsj.com/articles/tiktoā¦?
<shameless plug> Rubo is mentioned many times in my book. For the full story and much more check out my book Attention Factory: amazon.com/dp/B08L1578B6</shameless plug>
Here's Rubo in a company group photo taken in early 2014. What you see here was the entire company. Today it's 100,000+ people.
Interesting factoid: Douyin (TikTok China) was originally set up in 2016 under the legal entity, Beijing Weibo Vision Technology Co., Ltd., which was registered in Rubo's name, not Yiming's. I believe this is why he's often cited as "Douyin founder" in the Chinese press.
Across all the research I did for the book, I found Rubo never stops smiling! In every video and picture the guy basically always looks really upbeat.
You can see what I mean in this video of Rubo and Yiming interacting. youtube.com/watch?v=TIYPXpā¦
He worked with Yiming at several startups before ByteDance most notably real estate platform 99Fang where Yiming & Rubo learned how to build apps
1 of which was "Real Estate Information" which aggregated real estate articles. It was the direct predecessor of Toutiao
Liang Rubo and founder Zhang Yiming were dormitory roommates in university where they forged a deep friendship, studying, programming, and playing badminton together. When Yiming's dorm room PC was stolen, Rubo lent him money to buy a new one which they shared use of.
Rubo has a solid engineering background, at one point he was technical director for ByteDance back when the company was known only for its newsfeed app Toutiao "Daily Headlines"
Rubo's GitHub page: github.com/liangrubo
1/ Fascinating startup: Yidui, a video dating app in China.
Yidui users go on a video date chaperoned by a matchmaker, who helps guide the conversation & keep the date on track.
Viewers can livestream the date, chat live, & send virtual gifts to the people on the date.
Retweeted by Matthew Brennan A Chinese ecommerce player is now ranking above Amazon in its home market š¤Æ
Deep dive:notboring.co/p/shein-the-tiā¦rJ
"Real-time Retail" - the model powering China's most secretive ecommerce company. #SHEIN
Link: notboring.co/p/shein-the-tiā¦
Shein is easily the most exciting company in ecommerce right now. Explosive growth. notboring.co/p/shein-the-tiā¦
SHEIN is the quiet Chinese quindecacorn #addicting America's Gen Z shoppers. You've probably never heard of them.
- $10bn in 2020 rev
- $15bn valuation, Sequoia & Tiger
- #2 shopping app in the US
- Creating real-time retail
@mbrennanchina & I go DEEP.
notboring.co/p/shein-the-tiā¦
Retweeted by Matthew Brennan China's e-commerce exporters have been in shock and panic over the past few days after several top Chinese sellers on Amazon, also the largest across the entire marketplace, were suspended. techcrunch.com/2021/05/11/chiā¦
Retweeted by Matthew Brennan Aukey did like a billion usd in revenue on Amazon last year, this is their flagship store today š¬p
Amazon delisted all the products from several of China's largest cross-border ecommerce companies yesterday. Billion-dollar businesses cut off at the knees. twitter.com/CameronWalkerSā¦
New 2021 Douyin Ecommerce Ecosystem Whitepaper [
68 pages] A peek into the future ecommerce potential of TikTok. #ByteDance Download: dropbox.com/s/tpeap6u80y71ā¦
Hilarious! Someoneās been squatting on the Twitter handle @Tencent since 2011. Bio line in Chinese: "Daddy Tencent, quick come buy my account..." šļæ½3Q
As if that wasnāt enough, Chew was also involved in many of Milnerās other DST China investments which basically reads like an all-star China tech line-upāAlibaba, JD, Meituan, Didi, and Chewās eventual employer, Xiaomi.
<shameless plug> For the full story and much more check out my book Attention Factory: amazon.com/dp/B08L1578B6</shameless plug>
At the time ByteDance was reportedly valued at $60 million. Today, that value has reached $400 billion in the private market. That already puts Milner in the big league, along with Masa (Ali) and Naspers (Tencent) as one of G.O.A.T non-Chinese investors in China tech
Fortunately, unlike the local VCs, Singaporean Chew immediately hit it off with Yiming and saw him as a robust, capable founder with strong conviction in the companyās direction. Chew oversaw Milnerās investment which netted him 7.2% of the company.
Shouzi Chew was a partner at Milnerās DST fund in Beijing, he managed China investments for Milner, who didnāt speak Chinese and wasnāt on the ground. Chewās sign-off was needed to greenlight the deal.
A breakthrough came from a tipoff given by ByteDance angel investor Matt Huang's @matthuang recommendationāIsraeli-Russian physicist Yuri Milner
Milner made shockwaves in Silicon Valley, offering $150k convertible notes to every YC startup (40+ teams), Mattās team was 1 of them
One VC left a meeting after talking for just 15 minutes and complained āItās not my investment style to look at this kid.ā
Yiming spoke quickly in a soft voice. He was a young-looking, gentle, mild-mannered software programmer. Not the typical tough business leader.
Itās hard to believe now, but back in 2013, ByteDance was struggling to find money. Basically, no one in China had much interest in leading their series B on terms acceptable to CEO Yiming. Almost every famous Chinese VC has a story to tell on how they passed on ByteDance.
The story of how new TikTok CEO Shouzi Chew first came to know ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming.
A thread šš§µš
Ultimate China Social Media Marketing Cheatsheet 2021. High res version: assets.kawo.com/KAWO-China-Socā¦ via. @KAWO
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