ByteDance’s Lemon8 Aims to Compete with Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu, a mobile app featuring community social and lifestyle recommendations. At home, Douyin, TikTok’s sister app for mainland China, has spared no effort to develop its business to compete with Xiaohongshu, going so far as to set up a special “L” team. Overseas, it mainly focuses on Lemon8, extending from Japan to Southeast Asian markets.

At the beginning of 2020 in Japan, ByteDance took the lead in launching Sharee, a product similar to Xiaohongshu. It focused on sharing and recommendation notes before changing its name to Lemon8 in September 2021.

By March 2022, after the cumulative download volume in Japan exceeded one million, the app began to expand into other Southeast Asian markets. Lemon8 ranked tenth in the download list of Chinese overseas mobile applications in July 2022. It can be seen that the app is accelerating its advertising promotions.

One investor in the content creation industry suggested that the user scale can be made by burning money, and Lemon8 is at this stage. However, it is seemingly impossible to achieve a high penetration rate like Xiaohongshu in Chinese market since the likes of Instagram already exists overseas.