In a way, it’s amazing there wasn’t a good karaoke app for Chinese iPhone users years ago. After all, the KTV (China’s term for karaoke) experience is a big part of the entertainment scene in China. But Chen Hua, the man behind ‘Chang Ba,’ an iPhone KTV app that’s growing swiftly in popularity, is probably not too upset that no one beat him to the punch.
Chen (pictured below) has actually been working with his team on the app for 18 months now, but the app’s recent launch has been met with incredible demand: nearly a million downloads over the first twenty days, according to Chen. He revealed this during an extensive interview with Sina Tech, but for those who don’t read Chinese, we thought it might be worth sharing some of the highlights.
Chen isn’t a newcomer to the world of startups, having launched a failed coupon site before beginning work on Chang Ba. There were a number of reasons for its failure, but one that any Chinese startup might do well to heed is that Chen says he was overpowered by the big companies in the internet business. “Competition in the PC internet market is too fierce, and the big companies control the flow of traffic,” he told Sina Tech.
Chen Hua of Chang Ba
Chen also shed some light on how he and his team came to make a karaoke app:
At that time, we felt no one was doing anything with voices on mobile. At first, we wanted to make an app where users created their own content, like recording themselves telling stories. But we found that Chinese users weren’t good at creating their own content. Only a few people could create their own stories or songs, but everyone can sing a few songs.
It turns out Chen wasn’t wrong. The app has nearly a million downloads, is in the top 5 in its category on iTunes, and Chen says they’ve barely done any promotion for it. “We don’t need to do any special promotion,” Chen said, the app has spread via word of mouth. While there is a neat karaoke web app made by a Chinese startup, clearly that other company made the major mistake of not taking it onto people’s smartphones.
With regard to copyright issues, Chen says his company is aware of them and striving to respect copyright law, which is why the current selection of songs on Chang Ba is so limited (just over 1,000). But the company’s focus over the next two years will be to buy the rights to more songs now that the app is seeing some success.
Finally, Sina Tech asked Chen the question “every [Chinese] investor is going to ask.” Are you worried about China’s web giant, Tencent, copying your product? Chen responded:
Every startup gets asked this question, but the only answer is whether or not you’ve made your own product well. If you haven’t made your own product well, then what’s the use in paying attention to others? Is your product the best one in China? Is your team’s ability to execute better than anyone else’s? Whether or not you’re successful depends on you, not others.
Chen finished: “Every failed company is because you didn’t do [the product] well enough or you made a mistake, not because other people were competing with you.”
The ‘Chang Ba’ app is free in the iTunes App Store.
[via Sina Tech]
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