What are the biggest challenges WeChat faces as it expands outside of China?

Outside China, it won ‘t benefit from the giant user base Tencent had already when it launched in China.

People tends to consider Wechat as a brand new app which quickly acquired a billion users in a few years. This is only half of the story. A large part of the original users was dragged from what was already the biggest social network on Earth even before Facebook came to existence : Tencent QQ. I registered Wechat using my QQ account and so did all my friends back then. People all started using Wechat because QQ mobile was such a pain. QQ was essentially cheaper and more convenient than phone already for years. People needed to bring the social connections built with QQ, Qzone and all Tencent services on their mobile. Wechat solved that problem perfectly.

Even if Tencent has been executing brilliantly on Wechat, the app is not getting such a huge initial advantage anywhere anytime soon.

This text was originally published in quora.