New wave of startups fish users with apps

[Photo/China Daily]

Wang was pleasantly surprised that users in second-tier cities are more interested in experiencing the luxury lifestyle, like going to parties where the rich and famous mingle and taking a test drive of the Tesla.

"Active users of our app are also very young. They were mainly born in the 1980s and 90s," Wang points out.

Before setting up his mobile Internet business, Wang tried establishing a dating website for college students in 2004 and then an online booking service for car maintenance in 2008. Both of the startups failed.

Wang says when he was setting up the dating website, Jack Ma's Alibaba, which has become one of the biggest online shopping platforms, was still in its infancy. Web portal moguls like NetEase's Ding Lei were wooed by private ventures. Now these Internet giants and other private ventures are chasing mobile Web startups.

Wang's Yhouse has just finished its second round of funding from a US company and he is waiting ambitiously for new funding this year because "lots of investment companies are interested in my app". The app company of about 100 employees is planning to expand its team to 300 later this year.

"Mobile Web startups are crazier than their Web counterparts. Because China has such a huge base of mobile users, a good idea can attract lots of users in a short time," says Wang.

Guo Lie's app Lian Meng, which literally means "cute face", was a perfect example last year when it suddenly swept across China's social networks in one month.

The app allows users to turn their pictures into cartoons on social networking apps. It saw an unbelievable increase of about 6 million users within a single day in June last year. The craze lasted for a month, with dozens of millions of users, but it has slowed down gradually. Still, Guo's app lingers on the list of China's top-50 apps.

The 26-year-old's team has no more than 10 employees. All of them are aged 26 or younger. Before he launched his startup, Guo worked for China's Internet giant Tencent for one year.

Like Guo, young entrepreneurs with fresh ideas that aim to make a fortune from mobile Web have been springing up across China. They design social network apps that target different demographics, from MOMO, a Tinder-like app for strangers, and wumi (no secret), a social network in anonymity, to service-oriented apps like taxi-hailing app Didi and Kuaidi, the Chinese version of Uber.