anuh

First, writing stories on Olympic game results required data, and Toutiao pulled it from three sources: [a] real time score updates from the Olympics organization, [b] images from an image-gathering-company it had recently acquired to find relevant visual media, and [c] monitoring live text commentary about the game. Second, Toutiao had to figure out how to combine data from these three sources to ensure an internally consistent and relevant story. As a result of these efforts they were able to publish news story of a game approximately 2 seconds after the event ended as they collected and processed the information as the game progressed. In Toutiao's case news is the element with which they launched but today there is a lot more reason why users use the app (much beyond news). Local news, weather, information on agriculture, etc. are surfaced regularly which is why the app is quite popular nationally in China and not just in Beijing and Shanghai.

Once a question is submitted, the AI engine automatically recommends a list of relevant experts/potential answerers to the questioner to choose from. As a user you can choose who you want answers from. In addition the system also pushes the question to relevant users based on their interest graph. The system then also sorts the recommended answers based on its quality.

Toutiao is now focused on video as it is increasingly becoming more important (more supply of video content and more consumption as well). Outside of Chinese language centric markets they have an investment in India (which they have announced publicly). India is definitely a market that could potentially benefit from algorithm based content discovery (several different states/languages and a long tail of content that is not easily available to users).

I can’t convince you to be a believer :) That is totally up to you!

I am afraid I cannot do justice to this question by answering it in a few sentences in this forum. Toutiao is one of the first apps in China to enable creators to write content and find audience without having to go through other media outlets. So in a way they are transforming the way information is made available to people. If you would like to discuss more email me directly at [email protected]

Engagement alone is not success but sustainable and improving engagement (I.e. strong and improving cohort retention) is a measure of success because it creates a high barrier of exit for you as a user to stop using the app. 74 mins daily is not easy to create and sustain especially when you don’t have a social graph (On Facebook you are spending time talking to friends, reading updates from friends and content) but on Toutiao - you are only consuming content.

Good point. I believe Toutiao tries to show different content ocassionally to solve the exact problem you are describing. There may be new areas or other hot trending topics especially locally that you may need to be aware of and they use these attributes to push content. But this is something they continue to work on as well.

It is a mobile first app :) I don’t think they want anyone going to their website!

Good question. They did not have many social features at the start - especially in year 1 (no followers, no friends, no chat). Over time they added like, dislike, retweet, comments functionality.What made them really stand out in the first year was the catchy title, delicate product design and pretty much the first personalized news aggregator with recommendations in 2012. They also iterated heavily to remain as one of the top apps in the app store during the first year. In the first month - users gravitated towards the app as it became the destination to read all top trending news /stories that were going viral that day (it solved a gap in the market, no one else was doing it). Over time they recommended stories to users and tracked data to ensure only relevant stories were being pushed which helped increase engagement.

Nope. I have known the company from before my time at YC.

Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.

If you have only a small sample size to experiment with then you need to run experiments that can cause dramatic lifts (not minor changes like moving a link, etc.) Because if you have a sample size, then you need to wait much longer to measure the significance of these results and as a startup, time is not on your side.

Yes. We plan to! There are so many nuances with B2B that we felt it deserved a separate post. Having said that products like Slack (though B2B) is a lot similar to how a consumer app would scale. So it really depends on the type of product you are building

Great question. This really has to come top down and starts with the CEO. If the CEO urges the team to focus on the right metrics and asks questions on weekly reports then over time this will be in the DNA of the entire organization. Else it is really hard to get the organization to adopt these metrics