WTF is Lemon8?

Understanding what's next.

Hey Everyone,

Once again ByteDance is showing it understands app marketing at levels Meta or Google will never reach. Lemon8 is a visual lifestyle platform that is targeted to a female demographic and brings back Instagram’s flavor before it tried to copy stories and emulate TikTok, that is, it’s best days.

Lemon8 takes demographic allsure from the likes of Pinterest, Instagram and other lifestyle apps where pictures, carousel pictures, are the dominant content format. Visual marketing is already the dominant content format in 2023, and text based apps will have a hard time competing. If this was true five years ago, it’s even more true now.

Lemon8 is a photo and video sharing app, that looks a lot like a combination of Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest on subjects such as fashion, beauty, cooking or home. Chinese app makers understand that the critical demographic to quickly make an app go viral is young women. In many countries they are the trendsetters.

During times of a TikTok ban, China has already stood how to diversify their presence and ByteDance is the most innovative app maker in the world, and has been since at least 2017.

The total addressable market of Twitter or LinkedIn, or even Substack Notes will never be that large since young people have become used to apps like Snap, TikTok and now Lemon8. These apps provide less information and more connection and entertainment with their own generation. China prioritizes these apps because these are part of China’s long-term effort to influence world culture.

Meta is so incompetent, it’s not very difficult to do. There was a time where Facebook could have designed WhatsApp to be an everything-app, but that ship has sailed. ByteDance had the ability to lure popular social media creators (including those on TikTok) to Lemon8 before it is officially introduced this year. In 2023, it has been climbing up the app download charts.

By the end of March, 2023 it has entered the top 10 on some charts. Lemon8, which was first launched globally in March 2020 to compete with the likes of Meta-owned Instagram, jumped into the US App Store’s overall top charts at number 10 while yesterday, it was at number 9 in the ‘top apps’ section, excluding games. I actually think it disrupts Pinterest most of all, since Pinterest is the most vibrant “lifestyle” app per se.

Lemon8 is Designed for Social Commerce

What Lemon8 is actually a trojan horse app for social commerce, a trend long popular in China but a bit absent in the west. This involved live-streaming around Products, to help E-commerce thrive around Creators. As TikTok and Douyin can attest to, it’s really important for ByteDance’s revenue diversification.

For these companies Advertising isn’t the only revenue source, E-commerce becomes very important. ByteDance is basically what Snap would have become hadn’t Facebook existed. They design very solid products with the budget to make them go global (we are talking $Billions in marketing).

So while in the West, they barely know how to do app marketing, in China they can manufacture apps that scale that can go viral relatively quickly. This is because of their deep pockets and established playbook. By 2023, it’s a really noticeable difference. It comes from Silicon Valley stagnation, walled gardens and a lack of a dynamic mobile ecosystem. In China, not so much. Apps like Lemon8, Temu and others are example of how Chinese social commerce is arriving, not to mention discount shopping.

ByteDance’s decision to create Lemon8 really shows a sophistication of why they will disrupt Meta. I’m going to walk you though some of it: