Why I joined Kik
Hints: Asia, Facebook, and nice-guy Canadians
Note: I recently left Tesla to focus on my own writing projects and join Kik’s communications team.
I was recently walking with a tech reporter friend who asked me why I believed in Kik. Wasn’t I just a little blind to its challenges now I was working for the company? She didn’t know anyone who used it. She didn’t like the design. Facebook would crush it, Snapchat was too hot to catch. To her, Kik didn’t seem all that special.
I laughed and said, “Well, I know things about Kik that you don’t.”
It was an easy answer to give, but it was also too dismissive. Of course, it’s not obvious to everyone why I think so highly of Kik. When I got home, I realized that my belief is informed by things I’ve seen personally in the last 10 years.
In 2006, I was living in Hong Kong and working as a reporter covering the digital marketing industry in Asia. At that time, I was writing about how Facebook was starting to threaten the Asian companies that pioneered social networking: South Korea’s Cyworld and Japan’s Mixi. Facebook was considered a follower.
Three years later, I read in a Hong Kong newspaper that the most popular iPhone app among expats was WhatsApp, which allowed people to text their friends back home for free. It was obvious that messaging was going to be huge in the emerging smartphone era.
When I got to the US in 2010, I found that hardly anyone was using WhatsApp. Facebook and SMS still ruled. I joined PandoDaily in 2012. At that point, most tech reporters paid zero attention to messaging apps.
I spent the summer of 2012 in Shanghai. This was the summer of WeChat, Tencent’s mobile chat app. It was like WhatsApp on steroids, and everyone from rural grandparents to socialite Shanghainese bankers was on it. Meanwhile, KakaoTalk in South Korea and Line in Japan had earned similarly dominant footholds in their respective countries. I started writing about these apps for Pando. To me, it was clear that they represented the next step in social computing, They were the Facebooks of the mobile era.
In fact, these apps were more advanced than traditional social networks because they were based on private, one-to-one conversations, with the option to share content publicly if users so desired. WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk were also showing that chat apps had more ways to make money than traditional social networks. Facebook earns most of its revenue from display advertising, but WeChat was making money by distributing games, selling virtual goods, managing transactions like taxi bookings and smartphone sales, and offering opt-in advertising, where brands could talk to users who explicitly chose to hear from them. This was social computing done right.
Facebook is attempting to be more like WeChat. It’s 2006 all over again.
In July 2013, I wrote a story about social computing gone wrong. The piece, “Move fast, break things,” detailed the mistakes Facebook made with its platform, which had iOS-like potential. In 2007, Facebook Platform looked like it could become a social operating system and was consequently heralded with the appropriate enthusiasm. That was before Facebook started building its own native apps and changing the rules for third parties, ending the ability of developers to build meaningful products for the platform (with the questionable exception of games like Farmville). Now, with Messenger, Facebook is attempting to be more like WeChat. It’s 2006 all over again.
All the while, there was this little-known Canadian company called Kik. Kik launched as a cross-platform messenger in 2010 and went to 1 million users in two weeks. But then it got sued by BlackBerry and had to start over. Instead of being just another SMS replacement, it decided to build a web-based platform. By the time I came across Kik in 2013, it had 100 million registered users and was the best placed app to do in the US what WeChat was doing in China. However, because it was run by a bunch of nice, self-promotion-averse Canadians in the relative backwater of Waterloo, Ontario, no-one in the tech press paid it much attention. Piecing together its platform, its young userbase, its consistently high ranking in the app stores over several years, and its commonalities with WeChat, I came to believe that Kik was the dark horse of the internet.
After leaving Pando at the end of 2013, I became friends with Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston and got to know the company better. By this point, Facebook had paid about $20 billion to acquire WhatsApp, and all of a sudden chat was the hottest thing in Silicon Valley. Snapchat’s rise since has only confirmed that. (Incidentally, I’ve been interested to see Snapchat becoming more like YouTube than WeChat.) Since getting to know Ted better, I’ve become only more convinced that Kik has the vision and position to become, as Ted himself has written, the WeChat of the West.
That’s why I’m at Kik. Facebook is big and important, but WeChat in China is even bigger and more important. In China, there are more official accounts opened on WeChat every day than there are new websites. That’s largely because the mobile chat network is the ultimate in social computing. Kik is one of the very few players that could do the same here in the US. It has more than 200 million users and 40 percent of American teens. It has a fledgling web-based platform, and, while it’s still early days, it’s starting to attract brands and publishers. As it recently showed by putting a full-screen web browser into the app, Kik is just different.
What sealed the deal for me, though, is that Kik is a personally very satisfying place to work. As a reporter, I was exposed to a wide range of entrepreneurs and startup folks. The Kik folks were among the most humble and unpretentious people I met. I’m proud to now call them my colleagues.
So here’s the answer I can now give my skeptical tech reporter friend. I believe in Kik because no startup is better placed to win the chat race in the West. For a no-assholes company of 60 people in Waterloo battling the giants of Silicon Valley, Kik has already come a hell of a long way. But what’s so exciting about this company and this app is how much opportunity lies ahead.
Kik is still the dark horse of the internet. It just might not be for long.
