I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since CES at the start of this year. It was one of the most impressive and interesting things I saw at CES. However, it requires a real international perspective to understand the impact of the story. Hopefully I can flesh it out for you.
While at CES I ran into a company called Lifesense (All in Chinese). I almost didn’t stop at their booth because their booth was in Chinese, but I did recognize the pictures they had and the guy at the booth came out and said hi. I try to respectful so I stopped and talked for a minute.
At first appearance I just thought they were one of the hundreds of copy cat companies I’d seen all over the Fitness area of CES. They had a fitness tracker, a scale, a blood pressure cuff, etc. I guess in some ways they were/are a copy cat company since none of those things made them special (at least nothing I could see). However, it turned out that there was more than meets the eye and there was a reason their booth and website were in Chinese.
Turns out that Lifesense was only in China. They had no US presence (although, he thought that one day they might). As someone who’s always curious I wondered how well their health tracking products had done in China. He then recounted to me that they were lucky to be major partners with WeChat and so they’d had tremendous success in the Chinese market.
This is where I got most interested. For those not familiar with WeChat, it’s the go to IM/SMS/Facebook Messenger/SnapChat/Kik/Whatsapp/etc app for China. Everyone in China is pretty much on WeChat. Plus, unlike the companies that I just listed WeChat also has a built in commerce platform and engine for running third party apps. It’s amazing to think that an IM platform could be so powerful, but WeChat has shown that it can be. You literally can order Pizza or an Uber from within WeChat.
With that in mind, building a health tracking platform on WeChat solves so many of the challenges that US based fitness tracking applications have going against them. Take for example the experience with Fitbit. You can connect with your friends and “compete” against them to see who takes the most steps. However, it can be a pain to get all of your friends on the Fitbit platform so you can compete. Plus, this doesn’t even take into account that your friend has to have a Fitbit device.
Turns out that since Lifesense has built their Fitness tracking on WeChat, they can already connect you to all your other friends that are tracking their fitness with no work on your part. That feature literally just comes built in with WeChat. That’s so incredibly powerful since the social element to health is so important.
The problem in the US is that we don’t have a WeChat. There are a lot of platforms that are trying to do what WeChat’s done in China in the US, but they still have a long ways to go. Plus, it’s hard to imagine them ever becoming the dominant force that WeChat is in China.
As usual, I think there’s lots that we can learn from other countries. I think that’s the case with simple integrations like WeChat that open up all sorts of easy doors to improving health.
Here are some screenshots of the LifeSense app in WeChat for those that are interested to see how the app looks on top of WeChat:
