An invitation is a modest thing to build a company around. It has a date, a place and the delicate business of persuading someone to turn up. In October 2013, Ma Yanfei and his team made one for a charity dinner, designed to travel through WeChat. The invitation attracted attention beyond its immediate purpose. Within a year, the small act of asking people to attend an event had become the starting point for a tool that let other people make their own.
That tool was MAKA. Its founder, known in Chinese as 马雁飞, would spend the next several years working on a deceptively difficult question: how much design knowledge should a person need before being allowed to make something presentable? His answer, expressed through templates, mobile tools and a marketplace for creative work, was to keep lowering the admission price in expertise.
The interesting part of this story is how often the question changed shape. An invitation became an editor. An editor became a meeting place for designers and customers. A convenient way to make a page became a way for colleagues to work together. Through those changes, Ma kept returning to the person with something to say and an inconvenient shortage of technical skills.
Before the editor, a different kind of access
Ma studied sociology and business administration at Sun Yat-sen University. Before MAKA, his work took him into social enterprise: he served as strategic partnerships director at the Yunus Centre in China and was an early member of Grameen China. He also founded Grameenvision, a nonprofit-focused new-media marketing organization. His route into software ran through organizations that needed to explain their work and bring people into it.
His earlier partnerships included work involving Grameen Bank, the Yunus Centre in Dhaka and MIT Sloan's China Lab on microfinance projects in China. Grameenvision worked with organizations including the One Foundation and Save the Children. These were practical communications settings, with real audiences to reach. The later invitation makes sense within that professional background, without requiring a grand conversion scene or a childhood prophecy about software.
There is a useful distinction here between knowing how to design and needing a design. The two groups overlap less neatly than a software demonstration might suggest. A charity organizer needs an invitation. A small business needs a promotion. Both can have a clear message and still lack the means to give it a convincing form. MAKA's early work occupied that gap.
The invitation gets an editor
MAKA launched its online creation platform in September 2014. Early uptake was quick: it reached 200,000 registered users within 44 days. Those are historical registration figures, rather than a count of paying customers, but they explain why a narrow-looking use case could sustain a much larger product conversation.
There was an obvious temptation to keep making bespoke pages for clients. Instead, Ma pursued a standardized tool. The distinction mattered to the person on the other side of the transaction: a commissioned piece arrives finished, while an editor gives its user the possibility of making the next one. A new date or photograph need not become a new procurement exercise.
The early growth work was less glamorous than the finished pages. MAKA's marketing director, Huang Jianming, later described approaching forums and large websites individually, offering to make H5 pages for free in return for displaying the MAKA mark. Each piece of work could carry the name of the tool that made it. Distribution was built into an object people already had a reason to pass around.
By April 2015, MAKA had announced a pre-Series A investment from Matrix Partners China, described at the time as tens of millions of renminbi. Ma said the money would support team building and business expansion. The product offered beginner and advanced modes, giving different users different ways in rather than demanding that everyone arrive with the same competence.
The employee before the purchase order
At a December 2015 WeChat ecosystem conference in Beijing, Ma described a pattern familiar to anyone who has adopted a useful tool at work: employees could like a product before their bosses did. His account placed everyday use near the beginning of the sales story. A person had a job to finish; a tool helped; an organization could follow.
He also described needs that extended beyond making a page. A small company with a 3,000-renminbi promotional budget could struggle to arrange distribution through public accounts. An editor solved one stage of the work. Finding creative help and channels to reach an audience opened another set of problems. Ma's ambitions were moving toward connecting those activities.
That is an unusually practical way to discuss a creative product. The attractive page still has to go somewhere. Someone has to make it, publish it and decide whether it did any good. The more useful the creation tool becomes, the more clearly its user can see the unfinished work around it. Success has a habit of adding items to the to-do list.
A designer can sell the starting point
MAKA's template marketplace gave professional designers a role inside a product aimed at people without their training. The company recruited designers with Huaban, allowing users to adapt prepared layouts by replacing text and pictures. In this arrangement, professional work could become the starting point for many different acts of expression.
Ma's emphasis was ease of use. In 2017, he put it this way: “帮业余的人做专业的事，最重要的就是‘易用性’。” The standard is refreshingly concrete. A tool's sophistication means little to someone who cannot get through the task.
“Helping amateurs do professional work, the most important thing is ease of use.”
Ma Yanfei · 2017 · translated from Chinese
An earlier designer competition shows the commercial logic behind the marketplace. Templates could give their creators an ongoing source of income beyond a competition prize, while giving businesses a broader choice of ready-made starting points. The same layout could serve as a designer's product and a customer's shortcut. Ma's model left room for expertise to earn money while reducing how much expertise a customer needed.
His 2017 International Experience Design Conference appearance examined the simplicity and complexity of creative tools. It is an apt pairing. A simple experience has to accommodate real differences in what people want to make. Every extra capability offers another decision to expose, hide or organize. The designer of the tool inherits some of the difficulty that its users hope to avoid.
Even the connected founder waits for an invitation
Ma could be wry about his own place in the WeChat ecosystem. In a 2016 interview about the emerging mini-program format, he was asked whether he had received an invitation to try it. Despite being in the first cohort of Tencent and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business's Qingteng entrepreneurship program, he said he had not. He appended the written equivalent of a smiling face.
The joke came with a considered assessment. He saw possibilities in WeChat's existing audience and social connections, while emphasizing that developers' opportunities depended on how open the platform would be. He also raised the question of restrictions and developer confidence. Proximity to a platform did not mean every door had opened.
He appeared on the guest list for an October 2016 mini-program hackathon organized by iFanr and SegmentFault. The connection fits his public interests at the time: tools, distribution and the possibilities created by an expanding mobile platform. It also supplies a pleasant detail in the invitation story. The founder whose product began with an invitation could still find himself waiting for one.
When six people need the same folder
By June 2017, MAKA's enterprise offer included shared materials, team accounts and work folders. Ma described a six-person new-media team at Zhihu using the service to coordinate planning, copy, design and promotion. The unit of work had grown from the person editing a page to the group trying to get a campaign out together.
These are unromantic features, and that is their charm. A shared folder rarely gets the applause given to an animation. Yet a missing file or unclear handoff can be as obstructive as a difficult editor. MAKA's enterprise expansion acknowledged that communication has an internal audience before the external one ever sees the result.
In April 2018, a Startup Grind event in Guangzhou introduced Ma as the founder of both MAKA and Mori, a journaling and social product aimed at young women. The audience and purpose differed from an enterprise campaign, but the interest in helping people assemble and share something of their own was recognizable.
The charity invitation is still a useful place to end. It contained an immediate task, an audience and a reason to care about presentation. Ma built outward from that small piece of work into tools, creative commerce and collaboration. His public product philosophy keeps the person with the unfinished message in view. Somewhere, somebody has the words and the photograph. They would quite like to send the invitation before dinner is over.