The Birth of MIUI: Xiaomi's First 'Believers'

Prologue: A "Heretical" Decision

In the summer of 2010, at the Xiaomi office in Beijing, a heated debate about how the company should fire its "first shot" had been going on for days.

The atmosphere was tense.

According to conventional logic, a phone company's first product should, of course, be a phone. The head of hardware, Zhou Guangping, and his team were already working day and night, studying the supply chain and preparing for a big launch.

But Lei Jun proposed a decision that the hardware engineers couldn't comprehend: "We're not going to make a phone first. Our first product will be a phone ROM (operating system)."

The conference room was in an uproar. At the time, this decision seemed "heretical." What was a ROM? It was an invisible, intangible piece of software. Unlike a phone, you couldn't hold it, feel it, hold a press conference for it, or attract the flashbulbs of the media. More fatally, how could a free ROM make money? How would the company survive?

Lei Jun stood up, walked to the whiteboard, and drew a giant question mark.

He said, "Gentlemen, let's ask ourselves honestly, have any of us, who have always been in software and the internet, ever made a phone from scratch? We know almost nothing about hardware, supply chains, or distribution channels. If we rashly invest tens of millions now to make a phone and fail, we will never get another chance."

He paused, his tone becoming more resolute. "We must fight this battle in the way we are best at, the internet way. We will start with a minimum-cost product to reach our core users, to gather a group of people who believe in our philosophy, to validate our ideas, and to polish the product with them. This product is the ROM."

This ROM was named MIUI. It was a play on "Mi You" and also implied "Me, You, I," carrying a strong gene of community and user co-creation from its very first day.

Today, this decision is seen as a perfect implementation of the "lean startup" theory. But at the time, it required immense courage and foresight from the founder to go against all traditional business logic.

Act I: Seeking "Dream Sponsors" in the "Faint Light" of Forums

On August 16, 2010, the first beta version of MIUI was quietly released on a foreign Android developer forum called XDA.

There was no press conference, no press release. At that time, Xiaomi didn't even have an official website. Li Wanqiang and his marketing team used the most "primitive" and "stupid" method—manually posting on major phone forums at home and abroad to recruit "beta users."

The recruitment posts were not filled with fancy words, only simplicity and sincerity:

"Hello, we are a group of Chinese phone enthusiasts. We believe the Android system can be better, so we took it upon ourselves to create a ROM called MIUI. We want to invite you to perfect it with us. We have nothing now but a dream. Are you willing to join?"

Within a few days, 100 phone enthusiasts from all over the world replied to the email and flashed this little-known ROM. Among them were American college students, European programmers, and Southeast Asian geeks. Most of them didn't know that Xiaomi was a company, let alone who Lei Jun was. They were purely attracted by this idealistic call from China to "build a great system together."

Lei Jun later referred to these 100 people affectionately in an internal letter as Xiaomi's "100 sponsors of a dream."

These 100 people became MIUI's de facto "external product managers." With an almost demanding attitude, they submitted hundreds of bugs in different languages on the forum every day and proposed all kinds of imaginative feature suggestions. From a one-pixel offset in an icon to the interaction logic of text messages, to an obscure system setting, they would criticize without mercy.

And the Xiaomi engineering team responded to this enthusiasm in an astonishing way. They were on the forums almost 24/7, discussing issues with these anonymous users, sometimes even getting into heated arguments. A bug reported by a user in the morning might be fixed in the afternoon's version; a small suggestion made by a user at night might appear in the next day's update log with an acknowledgment.

This unprecedented sense of participation, of being respected and listened to, quickly transformed these 100 enthusiasts from "testers" into MIUI's most loyal "believers" and "evangelists." They spontaneously wrote reviews, posted tutorials on major forums, and spared no effort in recommending this magical ROM from China to their friends.

A single spark was starting a prairie fire.

Act II: The Fan Carnival of "Orange Friday"

To take this user co-creation model to the extreme, Li Wanqiang came up with a groundbreaking idea that would later be written into countless business school case studies—"weekly updates."

From the very first release, MIUI insisted on releasing a new version every Friday afternoon, without fail.

At the time, this decision completely subverted the development process of the entire software and mobile phone industry. Traditional software and phone manufacturers usually had update cycles measured in "months" or even "years." MIUI compressed this cycle to 7 days.

"Weekly updates" meant hellish pressure for the internal engineering team. It meant they had to complete a full cycle of requirements, development, testing, and release every week. But it was this extreme pressure that forced Xiaomi to establish a highly efficient automated process and rapid response mechanism from the very beginning.

For the users, however, "weekly updates" were an unprecedented and addictive experience. They felt that the system in their hands was not a cold piece of code, but a living thing that could "talk" to them. The feeling of seeing their suggestions quickly acknowledged and implemented gave them a sense of accomplishment and a deep emotional connection and sense of belonging to MIUI.

Every Friday became a regular festival for MIUI users. They would gather on the forums, waiting for the new version to be released, then immediately flash their phones to experience the new features, share their feelings on the forums, and show off to each other that their suggestions had been adopted. This tradition was affectionately called "Orange Friday" by the users (because the main color of Xiaomi's logo is orange).

Through this high-frequency interaction and iteration, MIUI's features and user experience evolved at a visible speed. In just one year, with no marketing budget, MIUI's global user base snowballed from the initial 100 to 500,000. These users came from different countries and spoke different languages, but they all shared a common name—"Mi Fans."

Epilogue: A "Leap of Faith" from Software to Hardware

On August 16, 2011, when Lei Jun stood on the stage of the press conference at Beijing's 798 Art District, wearing his iconic black T-shirt and holding the first-generation Xiaomi phone, he was no longer a "newbie in the hardware industry" flying blind.

Behind him stood 500,000 fervent "Mi Fans" who had fought alongside him for a year.

These people were the most loyal believers in MIUI. They had already deeply identified with Xiaomi's value of "making friends with users." When Xiaomi released its phone, for them, buying it was not a consumer decision but a "recharge of faith" for their past year's dedication.

In the first online sale of the Xiaomi Phone 1, the initial batch of 300,000 units was sold out in less than 5 minutes. This achievement shocked the entire industry.

Executives from all the traditional phone manufacturers studied Xiaomi with a magnifying glass, but they couldn't understand: how did a little-known company with no advertising, no distribution channels, and no celebrity endorsements create this sales miracle overnight?

They didn't understand that before releasing the hardware, Xiaomi had already used MIUI as a "reconnaissance scout" and "seeder" to complete the most core user screening, user education, and brand identification. When it released the phone, it was not a simple product sale, but a fan carnival that had been in preparation for a year.

First software, then hardware, using the community to gather believers. This "MIUI model" became Xiaomi's secret weapon for "dimensionally reducing" the traditional phone industry and later became the bible for countless internet hardware companies to emulate.

And it all started with that seemingly "heretical" decision and the initial "100 sponsors of a dream" found in the faint light.

Key Takeaways

1. Starting with software and using a community to validate the model is the 'reconnaissance scout' and 'seeder' for a hardware startup: Before investing huge sums in hardware, Xiaomi used a lightweight ROM product to validate market demand at low cost, accumulate core users, and spread its brand philosophy.
2. Turn your first users into your 'dream partners': Xiaomi didn't treat its early users as "guinea pigs" for testing but called them "sponsors of a dream," giving them great respect and a sense of participation. This practice turned users into the most loyal brand advocates.
3. "In the world of martial arts, speed is the only thing that matters" is reflected in rapid iteration in internet products: MIUI's "weekly update" strategy not only rapidly improved the product but, more importantly, established a continuous interactive relationship of growing together with users, forming strong community stickiness and a powerful word-of-mouth effect.