Asia Startup Pulse

Secret Sauce of ByteDance’s Massive Boom with Matthew Brennan, Book Author of “Attention Factory; The story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance”

Episode Summary

The likes of Alibaba, Tencent, and Pinduoduo have managed to rise as tech giants in China but have failed to leverage this dominance and influence to a global scale. One such company that has managed to strip away from that label and is successful in expanding overseas and in branding its product as a global pass is ByteDance. But, what has enabled it to do what most Chinese companies have not been able to do? We dive deep into answering these questions. What is the key differentiator of ByteDance compared to other prominent video-platform players? What breakthroughs has ByteDance overcome to flourish worldwide? What takeaways can be extracted from the gala of TikTok’s global success? In this episode, we invite one of our special friends Matthew Brennan, author of “Attention Factory; The story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance”. He is often featured in global media and has delivered presentations on Chinese digital innovation to global firms such as Google, Tencent, DHL, etc. Having monitored the Chinese tech ecosystem closely for a number of years, Matthew is well-positioned to answer our questions, dig deeper into ByteDance’s remarkable success, and share his insights on the mobile-tech environment in the East and West. We will also discuss the digital marketing schemes partaking in all startups and all kinds of business sizes. Last but not the least, some key insights on future tech innovations that can be observed from the ByteDance case.

Episode Notes

Today, we invite one of our special friends Matthew Brennan, author of “Attention Factory; The story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance”. He is often featured in global media and has delivered presentations on Chinese digital innovation to global firms such as Google, Tencent, DHL, etc. Having monitored the Chinese tech ecosystem closely for a number of years, Matthew is well-positioned to answer our questions, dig deeper into ByteDance’s remarkable success, and share his insights on the mobile-tech environment in the East and West. We will also discuss the digital marketing schemes partaking in all startups and all kinds of business sizes. Last but not the least, some key insights on future tech innovations that can be observed from the ByteDance case.

You can find the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Factory-TikTok-Chinas-ByteDance/dp/B08L3NW6VM/
 

Show Notes:

02:09 Introduce Matthew Brennan

03:20 Why ByteDance is able to build a global product, TikTok

05:57 TikTok, the product and technology

09:42 TikTok’s from-zero-to-one journey

16:30 TikTok’s monetization model and their new initiatives

22:20 Lessons from the success of ByteDance

30:40 Contact Matthew

Many thanks to our guest Matthew Brennan; host Ryan Shuken; producers Eva Shi and  Sagar Chaudhary; editor David; organizer Chinaccelerator; and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com

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