Case Studies on Resource Integration

Build yourself a personal account. Since a single WeChat ID can hold at most 5,000 contacts, I went all in—adding friends and joining every group I could find. Then I started reaching out to people with huge contact lists and formed an alliance. Each member had around 4,000–5,000 WeChat friends, giving us nearly 100,000 contacts in total.

Outwardly, we claimed to have over 100,000 followers concentrated on personal WeChat accounts and offered advertising space through our alliance. Back then, WeChat hadn’t launched Moments ads yet. Advertisers could contact us, and we’d have our members post their ads across their Moments feeds. We paid each person based on their friend count, pocketing the difference.

This was the kind of hustle people pulled off before the rise of KOCs—before community-based advertising became publicly known.