Overseas version of Xiaohongshu ByteDance Lemon8 is on fire in Europe and America

On October 6th, DoNews reported that according to Data.ai, since September, Lemon8, a lifestyle app under ByteDance, has been the most downloaded lifestyle app on American iOS devices, ranking in the top 20 of all iOS apps. It also ranks in the top 7 lifestyle apps on Android devices. This marks another breakthrough for Lemon8 since entering the American market.

Within ByteDance, Lemon8 is led by Chen Ying, who reports to Zhu Jun (Alex). The two had a superior-subordinate relationship during their time at musical.ly, which is now known as the overseas version of TikTok. Following ByteDance's acquisition of musical.ly in 2017, Chen Ying and Zhu Jun joined ByteDance together.

In March 2020, a social platform named Sharee was officially launched within ByteDance. As the name suggests, Sharee focuses on sharing and recommendations, initially targeting the overseas market. This year marked ByteDance's acceleration in the overseas market.

Around the same time, founder Zhang Yiming announced the appointments of Zhang Lidong and Zhang Nan in an internal memo, while he himself shifted his focus to "leading the company's global strategy and development." At that time, TikTok was facing challenges on multiple fronts, and this internal memo signaled ByteDance's efforts to strengthen its presence in the overseas market.

Sharee emerged in this context. At its inception, Sharee's team identified Japan as its first overseas destination, partly because Japan was still a relatively untapped market and partly due to the popularity of local beauty culture, which Sharee aimed to leverage.

In September 2021, Sharee was officially rebranded as Lemon8. The name was inspired by the similar pronunciation of "Lemonade," symbolizing the desire to share fresh content like refreshing lemonade, with the number 8 derived from the mathematical symbol "∞," representing the concept of infinity.

Subsequently, Lemon8 refined its positioning as an interest-based community, targeting young women in their twenties and thirties, with content predominantly presented in images, videos, covering fashion, beauty, food, fitness, travel, and other areas. This aligns closely with the content attributes of Xiaohongshu (RED).

Lemon8's browsing experience is also similar to Xiaohongshu. For example, platforms like Douyin and TikTok feature a single-sided video stream with only one content displayed on the page, while platforms like Xiaohongshu and Instagram have a double-sided image-text flow composed of multiple covers. Therefore, Lemon8 is also known as the "overseas version of Xiaohongshu."

Soon, Lemon8 gained traction in Japan, with cumulative downloads exceeding 1 million in March 2022. ByteDance then led Lemon8 to accelerate its expansion, entering various Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia Until 2023, after completing its trial in Asia, Lemon8 finally launched in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other regions. It quickly gained momentum and surged to the top 10 in the overall download rankings of the US App Store, surpassing many well-established social platforms such as YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Facebook.

Entering the fiercely competitive European and American markets, Lemon8 adopted the typical strategy of Chinese internet companies - spending money. This includes inviting KOLs to join by paying them, and driving traffic to support the content of these KOLs in order to attract more users. This strategy is similar to inviting celebrities to join platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu.

Furthermore, TikTok, which first established a foothold in overseas markets, provided great support to Lemon8. Not only did TikTok place a large number of advertisements for Lemon8 on the platform's "For You" section, but it also supported TikTok creators in directing traffic to Lemon8 on their personal pages. Currently, the hashtag "#Lemon8" on TikTok has accumulated approximately 4 billion views