The market for messaging apps is rapidly growing and highly competitive, so how can you compete? In Alibaba’s case, the Chinese company is actually paying its users to invite friends to its chat app Laiwang. The company hopes that this new method will help Laiwang compete with rival apps like WeChat which has over 270 million users.

Chinese messaging service WeChat has over 270 million active users worldwide at the last count — how do you compete against its overwhelming popularity? Well, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is now paying users who refer new people to its chat app Laiwang. An update is being rolled out to Laiwang which will feature an “invite” button for users to refer their friends, Alibaba told TNW. Every successful invitation will see both the referrer and new user get CNY5 (about $0.80) deposited into their Alipay account, and the credit can be spent on any of Alibaba’s Tao shopping platforms such as Taobao.