19 web and wechat products built in China this year

Retrospective 2017

Published in

Le Wagon

8 min readDec 29, 2017

15 months ago I announced the opening of a new kind of coding school in China. Shortly after, the Le Wagon coding school was granted the title of #1 coding bootcamp worldwide by specialized media, and all around the World our fast-growing network continued its mission in 2017: bring very practical skills to all entrepreneurs.

Le Wagon (summer 2017) — Chinese entrepreneurs in team work

Anyone who has experience in mainland China knows how fast things can go.

Guanxi and WeChat groups get you literally dozen of new meetings per week, acquaintances leading to cooperation then to business and always more connections.

The Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation movement has put our mission on a high-speed train. In May 2017, the official support from the Shanghai Technology & Sciences commission was a clear sign of trust in our actions from the government. We interviewed hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs looking for the mentorship and the resources of our network.

You can’t imagine how many smart people are willing to change their career path and make an impact in China.

As a result, over 2017 Le Wagon China selected and trained 80 wicked smart human beings in modern programming and product development. By completing Le Wagon’s immersive bootcamp, they are now active in the Chinese tech scene coding products, designing cool WeChat apps, launching companies, collaborating on projects.

Some more stats on our actions:

A total of 19 products were designed, coded, launched for the Chinese market (see the whole list below!)
We gathered a core crew of 14 experienced developers who taught 2120 hours of programming
The immersive program saw the inception of 2 startups now in operations 💪
We have trained dozens of WeChat experts, find them on: https://www.wechatdevelopers.com/
The community is hyperactive in 2 important hubs in parallel: Shanghai in the east, Chengdu in the west. We hosted 2 tech job fairs, with 100+ positions for each, and got involved in 4 hackathons.
Last but not least: our 63 community workshops welcomed over 2000 business folks, creatives, students, managers on a quarter-life crisis… and helped them to demystify our tech World! 😱

But since coding is meant to build products and solve real problems, we want to take a moment and review everything our trainees built this year.

We hope some of them will be inspiring for our fellows in the Western world!

In one year time, we will look back at this list, and check again the progress of our mission.

Their stack: Javascript ES6, ReactJS, WeChat Mini Programs, APIs, Rails and of course everything HTML/CSS.
Their types: WeChat services, Web platforms, Softwares As A Service…

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1. AiBee: Explore a hobby. Share your passion

Target: Young white-collar workers who want to have a cool lifestyle and do something different than hotpot, shopping and KTV.
Pain: Creative people would like to share their knowledge through event experiences
Solution: An online platform where local experts can register, create, promote and manage skill-sharing events and interested people can search, book, review.

2. TurtleCamp: manage college applications

Target: Chinese students applying for university abroad, their parents, and educational consultants specializing in college applications.
Pain: As an educational consultant, helping your student put together an application for university can be a document-heavy process.
Solution: A basecamp-style SAAS platform dedicated to managing college applications for foreign-university-bound Chinese students and educational consultants.

3. WedTales: share your wedding story

Target: Couples who are preparing their wedding ceremony
Pain: Couples wish to share their wedding story in a more convenient and more creative way
Solution: Create your beautiful responsive wedding website in minutes

4. (Post-camp) Feiy.co — Be the Change!

Le Wagon alumni — Jason, Patricia, Steph, Seb and Marc, led by mentor Dounan — dedicated 1 month’ time in building Feiy’s new community platform.

5. Lensoff

Target: Travelers who like taking photographs, and photographers with tons of equipment
Pain: Lens and camera accessories are expensive to buy, and hard to travel with. Owners of expensive camera equipment often use them only when traveling elsewhere, and store them rest of the time where they live.
Solution: Connect travelers and camera owners to finding good camera equipment easy and get some return for the investment.

6. TechforGood: Online courses for anyone wanting to make a difference!

Target: Those who’d like to learn a new skill/technology, while also contributing to impactful causes
Pain: People want to help solve social issues in a more direct and innovative way, but don’t know where to start
Solution: An education platform to scale the impact of a partnering social enterprise, Hands On, and help them eventually expand into other social issues/tech

7. WeChat app — SeeMe: Meet people instantly

Target: English speaking Shanghainese between the age of 18 and 35 years old
Pain: Barrier in cross-cultural communication in China
Solution: Use WeChat to meet people instantly in a natural way based on your location

8. WeChat app — VolunteerUs: Volunteer search and management platform

Target: University of Technology and Science
Pain: The pain for university students is that they don’t have enough meaningful volunteer experiences and resources to learn real-life jobs.
Solution: A WeChat platform for students to build their profile and create a volunteer portfolio

9. HealthyPaws: Feed your furry friend what fits them best.

Target: Dog owners
Pain: Information about dog nutrition online is not consolidated, comprehensive nor reliable, which can be overwhelming, confusing and a waste of time
Solution: Personalised feeding calculator, tracker (for health and allergies), database (recipes and resources) as well as a community

10. Aarusha Homes: providing safe, well-priced, high value rental housing solutions to migrants in urban India

Target: Aarusha tenants + Hotel staff
Pain: Inefficient hotel management systems lead to lack of efficiency in hotel tasks. Customers feel a lack of community spirit.
Solution: Web app that’s both customer-facing and internal between hotel staff/management. Limited access to certain modules of data.

11. Nizam Energy: Pakistan’s №1 solar energy company

Targets: Customer Service Representative, managers, and field agents at Nizam
Pain: We need to optimize the process of call logging, incentivizing employees, and overall efficiency regarding customer service.
Solution: Saas Platform that includes gamification, analytics, hierarchy control, and log optimization.

12. WeChat app - Elephant Listening Project: They are more like us than we think!

Targets: Conservationists/scientists/researchers, animal-lovers, schools: children/ teachers
Pain: Raising awareness for adoption, Education
Solution: WeChat adoption storytelling mini game

13. (Post-camp) FitFam Shanghai: volunteers organizing HIIT workouts for free

Target: Fitfam members
Pain: keep a consistent work-out routine.
Solution: WeChat app to streamline all of the onboarding process, scattered communication, event management

14. ShanghaiGreeters: a non-profit organization that matches visitors with friendly and enthusiastic Shanghai locals

Target: Greeters, Tourists
Pain: The current product lacks an automated program to generate contents and schedule/assign tasks, the interface is not friendly for mobile users.
Solution: Designing and automating work-flow processes to facilitate the daily operation. A redesign of the website interface to increase accessibility

15. WeChat app — EnglishGo: Practice spoken English or be a tutor. Both on the go. All through Wechat.

Target: Chinese students of English who want to practice their spoken skills. Accredited English teachers who want to tutor for extra income.
Pain: Chinese learners want to practice oral English with native speakers. English teachers in China want to tutor without negotiating or commuting.
Solution: A WeChat Mini Program platform to match native English teachers and Chinese learners to practice English with a pre-made curriculum.

16. BlackJets: the Airbnb of private Jets

Target: Businessmen in second-tier Chinese cities, younger professionals, private flight companies.
Pain: Flying in a private plane is an awesome VIP experience but it’s crazy expensive. People are looking for cheaper solutions.
Solution: Soon, everyone can fly private. We make private flights cheaper by making sure every plane is full. Oh, and we can fly our own planes too!

17. WeChat app — Bonfire: the place to share stories

Target: lonely 65+ seniors who live alone
Pain: to help lonely senior citizens feel less lonely
Solution: an easy to use audio interface that connects lonely senior citizens

18. WeChat app — Hui You Bao: “Save money while getting social”

Target: Young Families in China
Pain: Family pay money without knowing where their money go
Solution: Mini Wechat App to share discounts, record expenses and share among groups

19. WeChat app — Yao Chi Ma: “Wanna eat? Gotta shake it“

Target: Working tech savvy 25/ 35 years old that want to meet their friends but do not know where and when to meet as well as what to eat!
Pain: Where and what to eat! discussion can last for a long time with no decisions!
Solution: A Wechat Mini Program to shake and receive location of good cheap food!

2017 was a crazy year.

We look forward to what we will build together in 2018! 🎉

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Act now:
👉 Build your own WeChat app for 900 MAUs
👉 Join Le Wagon
👉 Hire a WeChat developer

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Connect with us:
🚩 Le Wagon in Chengdu
🚩 Le Wagon in Shanghai