Finding Direction and Connecting Dots: My Journey with GeeLark
By Dominic Li, the founder of GeeLark.
- Published:
The Formative Years
Wind the clock back to 2011. After three years of wrestling with C++, I joined Tencent and officially entered the big leagues of IT. I bounced around Tencent News, Tencent Weibo, and eventually WeChat, watching up close as China jumped from desktop to mobile. Those days were more than just coding – they were a crash course in human behavior and product design.
Allen Zhang, the founder of WeChat, was an unlikely mentor from afar. His belief that simplicity isn’t just an aesthetic, but a sign of respect for users’ time and attention, still anchors my approach. By 2015, I swapped the stability of Tencent for the chaos of my first start‑up, trying to connect traditional insurance companies with new O2O businesses. It was an early lesson in how the internet can rewire old industries – and how hard true innovation really is.
A year later, I landed at Alibaba to manage user growth for UC Browser. There I learned what real growth looks like and got a front‑row seat to the explosion of user‑generated content and short videos that would later change the game.
Searching for Purpose
By 2018, the comfort of working for industry giants started to feel… well, boring. So I teamed up with several former Tencent colleagues to build a start‑up that focused on the WeChat ecosystem.
We created hundreds of accounts, which we called an “account matrix”, that drove crazy traffic to our social commerce projects and built a loyal audience. It was here that I first encountered cloud phone technology. We used it to build a SaaS platform for in‑house marketing, helping online education providers manage their users more efficiently on WeChat and Rednote.
Then came the Covid-19. In 2021, I co-founded a DTC furniture business targeting the U.S. market with a former Alibaba colleague. Navigating supply chain nightmares felt like trying to row a boat in a typhoon, but we got through it.
The Moment of Clarity
Throughout 2022, a question kept nudging me: why were there plenty of marketing tools for desktop, but nothing truly built for mobile social media? It wasn’t just a random thought.
Across several ventures, I’d watched brands struggle to manage social channels efficiently. Social media apps like Facebook and Instagram have both desktop and mobile versions. Their importance is undeniable, but globally, more people use them on mobile devices. More importantly, social media platforms like TikTok are becoming even more popular, especially among younger users – and TikTok is mobile-native.
Existing tools were fragmented and clunky. Sometimes I wondered if I was imagining the problem, but every conversation with marketers echoed the same frustration.
By 2023, I was in serious talks with my soon-to-be cofounder, Dufei – an old friend from my early WeChat days who helped build the app’s Android version. We refined our vision and met potential investors. By late 2023, everything clicked. GeeLark was born.
From Vision to Reality
During those early days, you could really see my drive. I’d tell the team, “I know exactly what this thing should be and how we’re going to build it.” I even mapped out our weekly goals in spreadsheets – running things like a “benevolent dictator.”
Before we had the payment system set up – when all we had were the core features – I was already inviting friends to try it out. They were excited, but they also pointed out where we needed to improve. We hit up industry events, soaked up every bit of feedback, and kept tweaking the product.
I’d picture how people would use GeeLark, what roadblocks they’d hit, and how we could help them. On March 14, 2024, GeeLark went live as the first SaaS platform built on cloud‑phone technology for mobile social media marketing. Even though I felt we were on the right track, I still wondered how folks would react. Would others see the value we did?
The Growth Journey
Throughout 2024, we zeroed in on building automation tools for TikTok, working with everyone from big public companies to solo freelancers. Our clients not only validated what we were doing but also offered fresh ideas to make the platform better.
Seeing customers use GeeLark to tackle real challenges gave me a deep sense of satisfaction. That’s when I knew we were creating something that really mattered. By late 2024, after listening closely to our users, we rolled out automation support for YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Pinterest – turning GeeLark into a true all-in-one social media marketing platform, especially for UGC campaigns.
Then in early 2025, we had another big realization: while GeeLark could boost efficiency tenfold (or even a hundredfold), many teams struggled to keep up with the creative demands that came with that speed. So, we integrated generative AI tools like Seedance, KLING 2.1 Master, Hailuo 02, and Google Veo3 – not to flood social channels with more content, but to help brands create, manage, and optimize their social media presence with greater creativity, consistency, and impact.
We are facing different challenges every day. After all, GeeLark is the first antidetect phone product, and we need to explain to customers and the market what a cloud phone is and how it works. But I firmly believe the market needs a product like GeeLark.
The Path Forward
Today, GeeLark works with clients all over the world who rely on us to power their social media marketing. Our team runs on a tight two-week release cycle, constantly tweaking and improving the product based on real feedback and new challenges that pop up.
And honestly, this is just the beginning. GeeLark is still young, still evolving. As designer Charles Eames once said: “Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.” GeeLark might look like just another tool, but behind it is a big idea: changing the way businesses connect with people in the mobile social era.
One day or another, when GeeLark is in your area, you will love her. (Editor’s note: This is actually a reference to the Korean girl group BLΛƆKPIИK!)
