Linear Academy｜Former Founding Team Executive on How OnePlus Navigated Its Early Startup Days

Recently, Linear Capital's Linear Academy invited Yin Gong, former Vice President of OnePlus's Platform Center and founding team executive, to share his experiences with the Linear Academy community. He discussed OnePlus's launch phase, acceleration phase, and development insights to date, with particular focus on how a relatively niche brand built global brand influence in the smartphone market. We've compiled some of the content to share with you. The following is an oral account from Yin Gong, with minor edits. Guest: Yin Gong, former Vice President of OnePlus Platform Center and founding team executive. Compiled by: Linear Capital.

Today I'd like to share some stories from OnePlus's early days — experiences, decisions, and lessons learned from that time.

OnePlus was founded in Shenzhen in 2013, and merged with OPPO in 2021 as OPPO's online-focused sub-brand. I've been in the industry for about 18 years, starting in 2004 at Kingdee working on ERP systems, then moving to Taobao and Tmall for B2B business. Later I met Pete (OnePlus founder Pete Lau) and joined OnePlus. At the time, the company had fewer than 50 people, and I witnessed the entire process of building something from nothing. I've since left and am now exploring some tech-health initiatives.

During my time at OnePlus, my responsibilities shifted across different phases. Initially I focused more on digitization — global e-commerce platforms, internal and external business systems. Later I oversaw global logistics and service operations, and in the later stages I was mainly responsible for marketing resource management and brand building in North America. That's the brief background.

OnePlus Business, Product, and Brand Influence Overview

OnePlus was founded around December 2013, and launched its first product in 2014. By around July 2021, it had approximately 14 million active users globally, with operations mainly across four major regions: North America (primarily the US), India, Europe, and China. It had around 2,000 employees distributed across 27 countries, with products available in roughly 50 countries and regions.

OnePlus's core product was smartphones, with 1-2 flagship models released annually. In my recollection, the launch of the first product in 2014 was the first key milestone, followed by the OnePlus 3 in 2016, with steady progress during the 2016-2018 period. By 2018, OnePlus held the top position in India's premium smartphone market, with Apple in second and Samsung in third. In Northern Europe, OnePlus captured over 50% of the Android market share. In 2019, OnePlus established deep partnerships with T-Mobile and Verizon in the US, and also launched TVs, watches, and other products.

On the brand front, starting from 2016, OnePlus consistently ranked among the top Chinese brands going global. In the Global Top 50 Brands ranking, ahead of OnePlus were companies like Huawei, Lenovo, and ByteDance, with OnePlus placing around seventh or eighth — a solid achievement for us. When traveling around the world at that time, observing how people perceived Chinese brands, especially in terms of brand favorability, OnePlus performed very well with high user loyalty — that was our actual experience. We also won numerous awards, which I won't elaborate on.

Key Milestones in OnePlus's Entrepreneurial Journey

I. Launch Phase: 2013, the Smartphone Market Explosion

At the time, major manufacturers were developing, including shanzhai (copycat) phone makers. OnePlus's thinking was: we wanted to make the best phone on the market. The challenge was — how could we get people's attention in this red ocean?

We already had a clear positioning: we were an internet brand without offline channels. With no product yet and a small team, we first established a powerful concept, answering this core question: "Why do we want to make a phone?"

At the time, Pete saw how rough many Android shanzhai phones were. He believed in pursuing quality in everything we did. After much internal deliberation and discussion, he proposed a philosophy — "Never Settle." Our understanding of "Never Settle" meant no compromises. We wanted to make one product and make it the best possible, not letting any detail slide.

To support this philosophy, we created a webpage that opened with three large characters: 不将就 ("Never Settle"). It was a bold attitude that vividly expressed our philosophy and attracted some seed users who were dissatisfied with existing products.

That was the launch phase situation. Without a product, we put our brand proposition out there. Many users came to our forum to leave comments, discussing not just products but their stories. Through this approach, the first wave of seed users gradually gathered. Looking back now, I think this first step was absolutely correct. The brand proposition and philosophy were excellent, resonating with what many people wanted deep down — because everyone wants to be someone who never settles, to become a better version of themselves. That was the first point.

Second, we built our community first. Without a product, we started engaging with users first — through our philosophy, stories, organizing small workshops where we discussed their phone needs, problems they encountered, ideas they had, and so on. We did similar activities overseas, letting users participate in our product design. Many ideas and designs in OnePlus's first product came from users, which created high user loyalty and engagement. The first-generation forum moderators are still OnePlus phone users to this day.

Through this approach, OnePlus accumulated a large user base in a very short time, both domestically and overseas. To this day, OnePlus maintains this user participation philosophy.

Third, during the launch phase, a landmark event was our partnership with Cyanogen. Remember the custom ROM flashing scene back then? There were many different customized versions. We were thinking: if we're releasing our first phone, how do we leverage the first batch of users? So we approached Cyanogen — Cyanogen was the earliest custom system based on stock Android, with significant influence among global Android users, especially enthusiasts.

Initially Cyanogen was quite surprised — a Chinese brand with no product, what was there to talk about? But Pete spent a lot of time, found many connections, and talked with Cyanogen's CEO about our philosophy and vision. The partnership was eventually established. This collaboration helped us build excellent word-of-mouth overseas and played a crucial role in gathering our first batch of users. Cyanogen had its own user base, and our international version phones came with their adaptation with no restrictions on users. In retrospect, Cyanogen provided excellent credibility endorsement for our launch.

Additionally, we tried some interesting viral marketing experiments, mainly overseas. Here are two cases to share:

1. Through any creative method, smash or destroy your old phone, film a video and contact us, and OnePlus would send you a new OnePlus 1. This campaign was somewhat controversial, and internally we also felt it was quite bold, but it generated excellent response. It quickly went viral. Our takeaway was that users were curious — how could a newly established brand have such audacity to run this kind of campaign?

2. The invitation code purchase mechanism. The original purpose of invitation codes was to balance and predict sales and production capacity. We built a relatively complex system where users purchased through invitation codes, which could then proliferate. Some attracted users might not actually want to buy a phone — they just found it fun. This method allowed us to reach users we might never have reached otherwise, essentially designing a fun, scarcity-driven, participation-based approach with a sense of exclusivity before the product launch. This invitation code system was even featured by MIT's business school in 2014. Comparatively, Chinese people prefer excitement and buzz, so domestically we used flash sale methods.

There are two additional anecdotes here. One is that many users scrambled for invitation codes, with some even auctioning them on eBay — a phone priced at $300 was bid up to $7,000 on eBay, which surprised us too. We also used the invitation code purchase method for OnePlus 2 and OnePlus 3. The insight from this was that we would seize opportunities on social media, discover events — possibly not initiated by us — but when an event's momentum was building, we could amplify it through all channels to influence more users.

The second anecdote: we originally hadn't planned to enter the Indian market, but discovered a large volume of Indian IP addresses in our community backend — roughly 30%. The team went to India to investigate and found it was an excellent, fast-growing market. Around the same time in North America, we had been in contact with Amazon to explore partnership opportunities. It happened that Amazon was also looking to enter the Indian market, so we discussed potential collaboration. We encountered a small challenge: Amazon offered us some favorable conditions, such as premium placement on their platform, but we refused. We only had one condition — we wanted equal treatment for all users. Since we used invitation codes on our official website, we wanted the same on Amazon's platform. We communicated with Amazon to modify their purchase flow so users needed an invitation code to buy on Amazon as well.

This generated some internal discussion — we gave up favorable conditions to stick to our choice, pushing Amazon to modify its official purchase flow. We later learned this was the first time Amazon had adjusted its platform flow for an external merchant. We recognized this as a positive point worth amplifying to tell users: Amazon modified its platform for us, which also served as credibility endorsement for our brand.

On the team front, in early 2013 we had only about 80 people, with more than half in various European and American countries. For recruitment, we sought many overseas Chinese students or local overseas employees, with the principle of having them come to Shenzhen first. The benefit of this recruitment principle was, on one hand, their backgrounds helped us understand overseas user habits and connect with overseas users; on the other hand, having them come to Shenzhen first to work daily with headquarters staff made it easier to access management. We discussed daily how to make products better, brand culture, brand philosophy, and they absorbed this through immersion, deepening their understanding of the company, the team's product quality requirements, and how to communicate with users. This proved extremely helpful when they later conveyed and executed these philosophies in their respective regional offices, and these people became pioneers in our overseas market expansion.

A major turning point emerged in the second half of 2014: making overseas markets the core. Initially the OnePlus team was divided into domestic and overseas business units, emphasizing building a global brand but prioritizing domestic market development. However, the domestic market at that time was already fiercely competitive, making it difficult for us to capture market share. But we saw tremendous opportunity in overseas markets, which were relatively more mature and straightforward — product quality was core. Thus this shift occurred.

Looking back, our summary of the launch phase experience is that everything ultimately centered on product and service.

Our earliest proposed philosophy was "Never Settle," and everything from product to service revolved around it. On the product side, Pete himself was a product manager who basically spent all his time on products. We made many innovations. For example, we were the first to use a 5.5-inch large screen, used denim fabric for back covers, and included matte texture and other tactile back covers. Our charging cables used red flat cables, and accessories like water bottles and backpacks. The backpack was originally intended as a gift for users, and went through over 50 prototyping iterations before finalizing the design — unexpectedly it became very popular.

So overall, the initial focus was entirely on how to make our products compelling, more differentiated, and more brand-distinctive. Including later product iterations, the principle was that each generation had to have innovations not present in previous ones. We continuously invested in R&D to ensure product leadership. All products were displayed on the company's product wall as an internal manifestation of our product culture.

Second, the power of word-of-mouth always exceeds sales. With OnePlus 2, there were some product issues, and upon discovering them we quickly paused sales to make improvements. Internally, we always emphasized that we were making tech products in an extremely competitive, rapidly evolving space. With only one or two products released annually, every product had to be perfect. If two consecutive generations had problems or were imperfect/non-competitive, the brand would become mediocre. So we approached each generation with dedication and pursuit of excellence — in meetings, the boss would even say that if this year's product wasn't done well, the company would shut down. Good product surpasses everything. Whether making hardware or software, what matters is qualitative difference, not just being slightly better.

Beyond product was service. Initially our logistics and operations systems weren't mature enough. There were cases of missing or lost shipments. Early on, our Zendesk customer service system received thousands of user feedback emails, so we mobilized the entire company to respond. Despite various problems, one thing we did well was admitting when we didn't do well. We communicated openly with users, and regularly sent open letters explaining what we were doing, what difficulties we faced, and where we fell short.

In summary, product strength is the greatest guarantee; marketing is the icing on the cake.

II. Acceleration Phase, 2016-2018: Building Internal Capabilities, Addressing Weaknesses

After the rapid development of the launch phase, we recognized we still had homework to do in operations and service. During the acceleration phase, addressing these became the team's core focus.

1) Building our own operating system.

Regarding the OS, we didn't add features but focused on only two things. First was "fast, stable, efficient" — how to make the system faster, more stable, and more power-efficient. This related to the context at the time — Android systems were relatively complex with many issues and high power consumption. User pain points in this area were very clear, and after identifying them, with limited team size, we committed to core underlying support. Second was micro-innovations in the operating system. We made many micro-innovations on the stock Android base to optimize user operation experience. So many users' impression of the OnePlus system was clean interface and fast speed. One could even say that in OnePlus's first five years, software-wise we consistently focused on these few points, only beginning other adjustments later.

2) Improving logistics operations and service experience.

Logistics matter greatly for experience. If a user's phone broke and needed repair, delays in logistics and delivery severely impacted experience. To improve this, we established global logistics warehouses and optimized routing to ensure all deliveries reached users within two to three days. Simultaneously we began establishing global customer service centers and repair outlets to address after-sales issues and improve user after-sales experience.

3) Deep operations on social media and community.

This was one of the most successful things we did during this phase. Starting from 2013, OnePlus seized the growth dividends of Facebook and Twitter — operating accounts on these platforms was equivalent to establishing our own communication channels with users. Next was building our PR system, establishing and maintaining good interactions with media and opinion leaders. Additionally, we conducted many workshops, pop-up stores, forum weekly reports, all with the philosophy of community first.

In terms of organizational structure coordination, during the launch phase everything was directed by headquarters with regional teams responsible for operations and execution. During the acceleration phase, we tried developing regional models with local hiring. This transition process is never easy for any company. Additionally, we did some crossovers in products, expanding from early customer acquisition through TMT tech media to photography circles, entertainment circles, etc. — the core was breaking out of our niche.

III. Relatively Mature Phase, From 2018 to Present: Goal of Reaching More Users

OnePlus always had a brand strategy: cross-brand collaboration with brands sharing similar philosophies — mutual appreciation and cooperation, also serving as brand endorsement. We were very clear that we were a relatively small phone brand; to break out of our niche and make people unfamiliar with technology into our users, we needed partnerships with brands loved and trusted by the masses, such as Star Wars, McLaren, and others.

Of course, partnerships had principles. First, brand philosophy alignment with ours. Second, if we deemed a brand worthwhile, we would spend considerable time aligning with them. For example, with Disney — OnePlus started contacting Disney in 2015, moving them with sincerity and philosophy, gradually establishing some cooperation. We were very patient in this regard, believing that only by partnering with better brands could we become a more influential brand.

On marketing, we had done some good event marketing, but Pete always emphasized integrated marketing — always thinking three to five years ahead.

On products, during this period we expanded into new products like TVs, watches, and fitness bands. Once brand influence was established, brand momentum could generate more returns. Similarly, much compliance work was required.

Here I'll focus on sharing some compliance experience.

1. Regional and national compliance. We engaged local law firms to help us review, and if there were risks, we made quick adjustments.

2. In-depth research on local laws, economies, and cultures to ensure we knew which lines could not be crossed.

3. Certifications. This is relatively complex — environmental certifications, electronics patent certifications, etc. I won't elaborate here.

4. Privacy protection. All companies doing global business must prioritize compliance construction and privacy protection, without any侥幸心理 (lucky mentality/getting away with it).

Q&A

Q: What was OnePlus's experience in building overseas teams early on? For current companies going global, if teams cannot physically be together, how can you ensure team philosophy gets transmitted? What experience can you share?

A: Early on, OnePlus also found it difficult to find people from diverse backgrounds. After establishing our brand philosophy, we attracted our first wave of users in the community. We posted recruitment information in the community — our earliest employees came from these users who knew our philosophy, like-minded people who recognized your philosophy. This point is very important.

Second, early recruitment is best with low barriers but fast — quick in, quick out.

Third, while the pandemic does create current constraints, it's still best to have teams together initially — there's much that requires mutual磨合 (running-in/adjustment), observing how someone works, what their philosophy is, etc. If conditions truly don't permit, then it's just more meetings. While many people don't want meetings, you still need to chat more and video more, with cameras on so you can see eyes — this conveys much more than just an avatar.

Q: Regarding compliance, many companies conceptually understand the need to learn local cultures, but operationally, can OnePlus share some guiding principles based on actual experience?

A: OnePlus internally had a veto power regarding compliance and privacy — no mistakes could be made in this area. For Chinese companies doing overseas business, my suggestion is to first try to use global standards as much as possible, as this carries credibility endorsement. Second, you must first establish this awareness: privacy is a red line.

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