📑 Here is a case study of LINE Corp, a 173M user strong superapp you may have never heard of, but which started as a messenger app in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia.
🚀 Asia-born Superapp business model is spreading across the globe: WeChat in China, Grab in Singapore, Paytm in India, etc.
“Gartner predicted that +50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple superapps in the next 5 years.”
Andreessen Horowitz explains the concept as “App as OS”:
“How can we utilize our existing audience and share with them services that might seem unrelated to what we're doing in our core business, but that those users want to access anyways?”
WeChat famously has 3M mini-apps - roughly the size of Apple AppStore - all in one app.
LINE started as a WhatsApp-like communication app launched in 2011 and now used by ~ 70％ of Japan's population.
In the first 5yrs it added “Core Businesses”: Media/Ads, Games, Music, Manga, etc.
But in 2019 LINE decided to turn it into a super app in earnest, adding "Strategic businesses".
“Now, we’ve evolved into a new stage, becoming the “life infrastructure” that supports all aspects of users’ lives.”
They added to the app: Finance, Shopping, Healthcare, etc.
💰 Finance is a big one and this is where parallels with Twitter are the most obvious. Products LINE added:
In-app payments - LINE Pay
Credits - LINE Pocket money
Investments and Insurance
Credit Card
They also launched a digital LINE Bank that now has 5M+ users in Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia.
Finally LINE became a crypto player with LINE BITMAX, a crypto asset exchange, its own crypto asset - LINK and even an NFT marketplace.
🛒Shopping
LINE partnered with NAVER Corp and brought to its users a Shopify-like solution “MySmartStore”, an online e-commerce platform where merchants can manage and run their e-commerce operations.
💊 Healthcare
Line users can access “LINE Doctor” from the app, search/reserve clinic, consult physicians via video and pay them.
The list of LINE products is long and it includes restaurants, travel and even a TikTok competitor LINE Voom.
💡 From the last report, LINE's "strategic" revenue from superapp services was growing 📍 2.8X faster Y/Y than it's "core" revenue.
This is a roadmap that an app like Twitter, which already has a sticky user base with a high frequency interactions, might take an inspiration from.
👍 Check:
Workshop on Platform Strategy with Marshall Van Alstyne, author of Platform Revolution
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