2026-11-06
Product #45 · WeChat Red Packets (2014): How a 9-Person Team Coded a Thousand-Year Tradition and Completed a Decade of Bank-Card Onboarding in One Night
Global Product Top 100 #45 (88 OVR). Just two weeks before the 2014 Lunar New Year, a 9-person strike team inside Tencent digitized the Chinese 'Hongbao' (lucky money) ritual and added a random 'Lucky Draw' split algorithm. With zero marketing subsidies, it onboarded hundreds of millions of bank cards over a single holiday—a move Jack Ma called a 'Pearl Harbor attack' on Alipay.
