Growing up in China, then moving to the States, I get asked about Superapps constantly by international friends. It sounds grand and obvious. My answer is always the same: it's not that easy! Every superapp starts as one genuinely indispensable app. Let’s use WeChat as an example: 2011: Messaging (core chat) 2012: Moments (social timeline) 2013: WeChat Pay (payments) 2014: Red Packets (红包), arguably the single most important product moment in WeChat's history. Launched during Chinese New Year, it went viral overnight and onboarded hundreds of millions of users onto WeChat Pay in weeks. Tencent later called it a "Pearl Harbor attack" on Alibaba's Alipay dominance. 2015: WeChat Pay expanded into offline retail broadly. 2016: Enterprise WeChat 2017: Mini Programs, which allowed third-party apps to run natively inside WeChat without users downloading anything. 2020: Channels (short video, direct response to Douyin/TikTok's dominance.) 2022+: Deeper Channels integration, live commerce, search ambitions It's the heaviest app on my phone and i'm forever grateful that it exists so i can send silly photos to my parents when I was roaming around the world. Never forget that building the initial core product sets the foundation for everything that comes after