Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…We don't have time to talk about this, but one of my favorite features about it is there's essentially a FarmVille clone in the app where when you finish growing your tree, they actually ship you a box of fruit. Another big playbook thing that we have to call out here is—thanks to Hamilton Helmer for providing us a framework to think about this—recognizing a counter positioning opportunity to build an amazing moat around your business. With PDD, Colin realized that with the newly launched WeChat Mini Programs, there was an opportunity to leverage the WeChat social graph for ecommerce. Not only that, but he realized that it would be defensible from the largest competitor out there in ecommerce, Alibaba. Since Alibaba competed with Tencent and basically wouldn't use WeChat platform, in fact, I think Alibaba actually banned their sellers from encouraging the use of WeChat and made them use their own chat platform. Of course, there are others who could compete with Pinduoduo on WeChat, but Colin at least had that wide-open lane versus the biggest incumbent. This is that classic example of counter positioning since in order for Alibaba to see that Pinduoduo's strategy was working and then copy them, they would have needed to do serious damage to their own existing business to convince Tencent to allow them the amazing native of functionality that they were providing to Pinduoduo. There might be another structural reason too to why they couldn't respond which is the payments layer. WeChat and AliPay are mortal enemies. Was Alibaba really going to let people buy stuff on Taobao and Tmall using WeChat pay when they're fighting a tooth and nail against AliPay?…

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