Original title: After Losing to Facebook, Vietnam's National App No Longer Tries to Be a "Better Facebook"
Author: Li Penghui
Source: Dongdian Going Global
Cover image source | pexels
In September this year, Zalo founder Vương Quang Khải returned to his alma mater—Hanoi University of Science and Technology.
Standing before young people who had just enrolled, this veteran of the Vietnamese internet industry did not rush to introduce how many achievements he had made today, but instead talked about a social product that had long faded from people's view.
Its name was Zing Me.
This social network, developed by his team, once had nearly 10 million users and at one point led Facebook in the Vietnamese market. But later, as Facebook rapidly expanded its user base, Zing Me gradually lost its competitive advantage and eventually exited the market.
For Vương Quang Khải, this experience once made him feel deeply frustrated. Even with an excellent team of engineers, against capital, technology, and global user networks, they still found it very difficult to compete with Facebook.
But after this failure, Vương Quang Khải and his team went on to create another product, and ultimately won the opportunity to compete with many international giants in the Vietnamese market.
This time, its name was Zalo.
After losing to Facebook, what else could it do?
At the time, Vietnamese tech company VNG had already established a foothold through online games and the Zing series of products. In 2009, the company launched the social network Zing Me, headed by Vương Quang Khải, hoping to build an online social platform belonging to Vietnamese local users.
At first, Zing Me developed quite smoothly. With games, entertainment content, and localized features, it quickly attracted a large number of young users. Before Facebook had fully opened up the Vietnamese market, Zing Me even occupied a leading position in the local social network space.
But this advantage did not last long.
As Facebook expanded rapidly in Vietnam, Zing Me's users gradually shifted to the international platform. For social networks, where your friends are often matters more than how many features the product itself has. Facebook's ever-expanding global relationship network made it very difficult for local platforms to maintain their original competitive position.
In a later interview with VnExpress, Vương Quang Khải candidly admitted that this failure made him rethink one thing: if you simply imitate international giants and then try to make a similar product better, local teams find it hard to truly build an advantage.
Rather than continuing to compete in areas where rivals already hold the advantage, it is better to look for needs that have not yet been fully met.
During the days of frustration in his entrepreneurial journey, he happened to walk into the Vietnam National Museum of History in Hanoi. Looking at the historical exhibits on display, he began to think about how people in the past had found ways to solve problems with limited resources.
This experience reignited his desire to try again. It happened that the Vietnamese internet market was welcoming another change at the time.
As smartphones gradually became widespread, people began to shift from computers to mobile devices. Social activities that had relied on desktop web pages were gradually replaced by mobile instant messaging. Products such as Viber, WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk entered Vietnam one after another. For a team that had already suffered failure in the social network market, competing again with international companies was clearly not an easy choice.
But Vương Quang Khải decided to try once more. He led VNG's engineers to launch a new project, hoping to develop a mobile messaging app suited to Vietnamese users.
This was the starting point of Zalo.
Knock it down, then start over
Zalo's first attempt did not go smoothly.
The team had mainly developed web products before and lacked experience in mobile apps. So they followed their familiar approach: using Zing accounts to log in and borrowing Zing Me's existing chat technology. This saved development time and leveraged VNG's existing user base. But when the product actually ran on phones, problems quickly surfaced.
The complex login method raised the barrier to use, and carrying over the web product's technical architecture also limited the mobile experience. Meanwhile, competitors had already run ahead. While Zalo was still in development, WeChat entered the Vietnamese market through large-scale promotion, and other international messaging apps were also fighting for local users.
In August 2012, Zalo launched its first test version, and the market response was not ideal. According to the development team's later review, they ultimately decided to abandon the original plan and rebuild the product. This time, the team changed its approach, no longer trying to transplant a web product directly into phones, but redesigning the messaging experience based on mobile device usage habits.
Image source: Zalo official website
At the time, Vietnam's mobile network was still unstable, and many consumers were still using phones with limited specs. For these people, no matter how rich the features of a chat app, if messages could not be sent and voice calls kept dropping, it would be hard for them to actually use it.
Zalo therefore began optimizing message transmission for the local network environment, adapting to more ordinary phones, and improving messaging speed through servers deployed locally in Vietnam.
Rather than endlessly adding social features, the team put more effort into one fundamental thing: letting users conveniently and reliably stay in touch with family and friends.
A few months later, the rebuilt Zalo officially launched. This time, the market gave a different answer.
Just over a month after its official launch, Zalo reached the top of the Vietnamese App Store rankings. Soon after, its user base quickly surpassed one million. However, this competition was far from over. LINE and KakaoTalk subsequently launched large-scale promotion campaigns in Vietnam, and Viber had already accumulated a large number of local users.
Zalo also had VNG's capital and technical support behind it, but compared with rivals developing through the global market, it chose to invest more effort in the actual needs of Vietnamese users.
Vương Quang Khải later summarized this choice as three principles: simplicity, reliability, and privacy.
Is expansion an inevitable path for growth?
As users kept growing, Zalo also began to face a new question: since it could succeed in Vietnam, why not bring this experience to other countries?
The team did try expanding overseas.
Zalo once entered the Myanmar market and attracted about 2 million users within just a few months. To adapt to local network conditions, engineers even traveled to Myanmar specifically to study user habits and deploy local servers. But the experience that worked in Vietnam did not let it replicate the same success in other markets.
Vương Quang Khải later explained that Zalo's advantage in Vietnam largely came from its understanding of local users, communication conditions, and usage habits. Once away from this environment, these advantages weakened. So Zalo gradually shifted its development focus back to its home market.
At the same time, Zalo itself was also changing.
Initially, the app mainly served communication between family and friends. But more and more people began using Zalo for work, businesses hoped to reach customers through it, and merchants also wanted to leverage the existing user network to conduct business. Vương Quang Khải, however, was reluctant to let Zalo lose its original character.
He once called himself Zalo's "User Zero"—the zeroth user, and the hardest one to please. When it came to what features the product should add, he insisted on starting from the messaging experience he himself wanted, then validating through user feedback.
The Zalo app interface. Image source: Zalo official website
For example, Zalo once deliberately restricted users from logging in on multiple devices simultaneously. Although this design drew criticism, Vương Quang Khải still believed that some convenience in features needed to give way to the simplicity, stability, and privacy the product originally pursued.
As businesses, schools, and public institutions began using the platform, Zalo gradually developed Zalo Business, official enterprise accounts, Mini Apps, and notification services, placing some advanced features in dedicated services.
Through this, residents can receive notifications and query public service information through official accounts opened by government agencies on Zalo, and in some places can even handle related matters directly through Mini Apps. According to data disclosed by Zalo, there are already more than 17,000 official accounts of government agencies on the platform.
In terms of user scale, by the first half of this year, Zalo had 81.3 million monthly active users, sending about 2.2 billion messages per day, making it one of Vietnam's most important communication platforms. For comparison, the average population last year published by the Vietnam General Statistics Office was about 102.3 million, meaning Zalo's monthly active users are equivalent to nearly 80% of the national population.
Conclusion
Looking back at Zalo's development, Vương Quang Khải and his team faced similar situations twice: the first time losing to Facebook in the social network market, and the second time having to find opportunities for a rebuilt messaging app among a group of powerful international competitors.
The difference is that this time, they gradually found a way that suited them.
From the failure of Zing Me, to the rebuild of Zalo's initial version, to choosing to focus on the Vietnamese market, the path this company has taken is already very different from Vương Quang Khải's original vision of chasing international internet giants.
In that speech to new students at his alma mater, Vương Quang Khải also talked about his understanding of technology.
He said that as an engineer, the greatest pride is not writing how complex a software system is, but seeing parents and loved ones truly use the products he has created.
For someone who once hoped to catch up with the world's internet giants through technology, this might also be another answer he found in Zalo more than a decade later.
