[Startup Struggle ①-4] Understanding Gen Z Psychology and Creating 'TikTok' by Chinese Zaiming

Global Startup Billionaires in Their 30s

[Asia Economy Reporter Onyu Lim] "The most valuable startup in the world." This is the phrase used to describe China's ByteDance. ByteDance's corporate value is a staggering $74 billion (approximately 87.3 trillion KRW). The cumulative number of downloads has surpassed 1.5 billion, and the number of subscribers has exceeded 1 billion. With its AI-powered news recommendation app "Jinri Toutiao" and the 15-second short video sharing platform "TikTok," it has achieved massive success and joined the ranks of super unicorns.

◆China's Startup Icon 'ByteDance'= The founder who nurtured ByteDance is Zhang Yiming, a rising billionaire representing China's post-80s generation. After graduating from Nankai University and joining Microsoft (MS) China branch, he resigned within a year. He chose the path of a "serial entrepreneur." After founding the travel search engine "Kuxun" and the real estate search engine "ZhuZhuFang," he established ByteDance in August 2012.

The beginning was Jinri Toutiao, an application that edits news tailored to user preferences using AI, which is credited with changing the landscape of news consumption in China. It has over 100 million daily users. Later, TikTok was launched and gained popularity worldwide beyond China, transforming ByteDance into a super unicorn.

Even Chairman Zhang did not anticipate TikTok becoming ByteDance's biggest cash cow. This was due to his unique strategy. Once the strategy and direction were set, he launched multiple services simultaneously to gauge market response, then invested all resources into the service that received the greatest response. TikTok was no exception. Centered around the major trend of "short videos," ByteDance released music-focused TikTok, daily life-focused Xigua, and stunt-focused HuoShan in succession. TikTok survived. It penetrated the psychology of Generation Z (born after 1995), who want to express themselves.

◆The Brilliant Success Story of the Brainy Brothers= "Upgrade until it can no longer be simplified." This is a quote from Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe. Stripe is a fintech startup challenging the dominance of PayPal, the global leader in electronic payments, by providing services that easily integrate payment modules into applications and websites. According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Stripe's corporate value this year reached $35 billion (approximately 40.75 trillion KRW), far surpassing the decacorn status (startups valued over $10 billion). This achievement was made in just nine years since its founding.

What is even more remarkable is that the owners of Stripe are the Collison brothers, Patrick (32) and John (30), who are barely in their thirties. Among these "brainy brothers," elder Patrick attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and younger John went to Harvard University but dropped out to start the company.

The Collison brothers focused on the inconvenience of online payments in daily life. Ten years ago, online and mobile payments were not as convenient as they are now. They recalled it as "the same inconvenience as going to the bank to pay after going to a store to buy something." At that time, both consumers and businesses often gave up on online and mobile payments due to the difficulty of integrating payment systems.

In response, the Collison brothers created a service that allows companies to build payment systems by copying and pasting just seven lines of code onto their sites. While PayPal required nine steps to integrate its payment system, Stripe reduced this to three steps. Ultimately, Stripe's success lay in accurately identifying the pain points of consumers and businesses and maximizing convenience. According to WSJ, 84% of American adults have experienced Stripe payments.