Zhu Bajie, one of the protagonists of Journey to the West, is lazy to eat, thinks about marrying a daughter-in-law every day, and occasionally makes jokes, and brings a lot of joy to the audience all the way to the West. The entrepreneur we are introducing today isFounder of Zhu Bajie.com--Zhu Mingyue, the largest Chinese Weike.com of Zhu Bajie.com, was founded in 2006, and its service trading categories cover various industries such as creative design, website construction, online marketing, copywriting planning, and life services.
On June 15, 2015, Zhu Bajie announced the completion of the C round of financing, from 5 million angels to the company to raise 2.6 billion yuan, with a valuation of more than 10 billion. This company is shocking, you know, but a year ago, Zhu Bajie.com's valuation in the last round of financing was less than one-tenth of today's. Zhu Mingyue, the founder of Zhu Bajie.com, used to be a chief reporter, and chose to start a business when he saw that traditional media was about to decline.As a result, he stepped into the realm of death that all entrepreneurs avoided, and struggled in the wicker model for a full ten years before running out. For example, when he first started his business, he verbally promised to give a programmer's shares, and after establishing the company and financing, he did not break his word, and this part of the shares was worth a lot of money. In the C round of financing, a big guy used the divestment as a bargaining chip to suppress the price the day before the press conference, and Lao Zhu was able to explode with a bull temper and grit his teeth and not let go.Zhu Mingyue said that it took me 10 years to fight out of the Red Sea of Death, relying on four words - to survive my opponent。 This word seems to be very hard, but it is also the most violent collision of traditional industries in the face of "Internet +".
The following is the oral account of Zhu Mingyue, the founder of Zhu Bajie.com (not reviewed by me):
The first step in entrepreneurship: from a chief journalist to a product manager
I am a journalist, and there is a saying that a reporter is always the first party in Party A, so I belong to the type of person who lacks the most user thinking. But after starting a business, I realized that the essence of the Internet is a product, so the first step in my business was to change myself from a journalist to a product manager.
Zhu Bajie has carried out seven Tengyun actions, all of which are major transformations of products. These seven Tengyun operations were all led by me, although the results were not ideal, and each time I returned with a feather. But in the past few years, as a chief reporter with itchy hands, I have not written an article. I said to myself, don't write, I'm a product manager now, not a journalist, not even an entrepreneur. Every product, from wireframing to design and interaction, is almost all done by me with a designer. I spent 10 years transitioning from a lead journalist to a product manager.
At the same time, in these seven Tengyun operations,I explored the pain points of Zhu Bajie's online buyers from the Red Sea of Death:
The first is to be cheap:A person with only one or two hundred thousand capital to start a business will definitely not spend a lot of money to make a brand, but he wants to have a brand。 I passedGo to the university to find a part-time designer to take over the job to keep costs down。 Although these people can't do a good job, they don't pick jobs and can solve the most immediate problems.
The second is to learn to provide services to novice users：Most of the design services on Zhu Bajie Online are paid for by the owners of small, medium and micro enterprises, and they are all non-professional buyers. There used to be a website called Task China, which was made by Tencent people, and the things were very professional, but the transaction volume was very low. The reason is that most buyers are novice users who don't understand design, website development and other things at all, and their bidding process is too complicated. For novice users, we only ask for the phone, title and needs, and we will help them sort out the rest.
Step 2: Use relative competitive strategy to fight your opponent
But the change of identity is only the first step, and if you want to defeat your peers, you still need to compete. In order to quickly defeat the opponent, we launched a relative competition strategy, which is called the "dog jumps over the wall" PK system.
When Zhu Bajie entered the industry, there were thirty or forty competitors, and we ranked fifth or sixth, because in Chongqing, we were the most despised. The boss at that time was K68, who single-handedly created the free broker trading model, which had the largest transaction volume and number of users. After we took 5 million angel investment, we developed a strategy to challenge K68 and let the whole team focus on one point.
The trading platform does not look at commissions, does not look at profits, only looks at whether the daily users and transaction volume exceed K68. At that time, we put a blackboard in the office to write down the daily users and transaction volume, as long as our data exceeded K68 that day, we cashed out the 200 yuan bonus to the trading team on the same day, and it only took 9 months for our data to surpass him. After killing them, we turn our opponents of relative competitive strategy into ourselves.
My experience is:
1. Monopolize buyer traffic through the platform as much as possible. The buyer is more important than the service provider. Only when there are enough orders on the platform can the service provider be coerced into order, so you must first be a buyer, have an order, and then integrate the industry resources of the service provider;
2. Through the encapsulation of services, the transaction process should be encapsulated as much as possible, and the service process should be standardized, but not the standardization of the service itself.
3. Use rules to control service providers on the platform, not follow the C2C bazaar model, and give priority to serving buyers.
Step 3: Use strong cash flow to kill your opponent
If a startup wants to be big, it must also pay attention to cash flow.Zhu Bajie got its first angel in 2007 and spent 5 million for 4 years. Many people say that I am not starting a business, but managing money.
In fact, I have always been very good at managing cash flow. In every transaction we make, the buyer has to put the bounty in first, and then send it out after the 21-day account period, so that the funds are deposited and the cash flow is always there. And I also sorted out the business model very clearly, only the transformation of the business model is enough to cover the cost of market investment, and only the money is invested.
Internet buyer traffic is very important, but if you only consider maximizing buyer traffic and do not understand the accounting business model, it is easy to fall into the point of cash flow breakage.Task China took 20 to 30 million yuan in financing at the beginning, and recognized that buyers were very important very early, so it pursued buyer traffic on a large scale and invested in advertisements on a large scale from the beginning. However, the product conversion efficiency at that time was not enough to support the cost of buyer traffic development, and the result was that after a period of time, their cash flow was cut off. Before the product digestion ability was not mature, Zhu Bajie took care of itself and slowly survived the opponent.
It doesn't matter whether a company makes money or not, but cash flow is more important.A CEO who can't manage his cash flow well is definitely not a good CEO.Of course, even a profitable CEO may be wrong, because he may have slowed down excessively, sacrificing the future for temporary gains. Therefore, I think the CEO who can protect his cash flow is the most awesome, because he makes the company develop sustainably and is not afraid of how many years it takes.
Step 4: Wait for the wind on the right outlet
Zhu Bajie Network can raise funds to reach this amount, and more importantly, the Zhu Bajie website is on the tuyere today. Stay in the right place and wait for the wind outlet to come. In China, the value of intelligence, services, and intellectual property rights has been underestimated for a long time, and now they are beginning to recover and slowly form a wind outlet, and it is not the kind of wind that comes and goes for a long time.
I have seen the fact that intelligence, service, and intellectual property rights are undervalued early on, which is a relatively closed and not much temptation, and Zhu Bajie.com in this relatively closed environment, the change is the most positive, with seven Tengyun actions throughout Zhu Bajie.com for 10 years, and we have been figuring out what is right - although it will be very slow.
Zhu Bajie has changed two things in its development: the first is the use of Internet technology and thinking, so that the growth radius of customers and service providers has changed from a few kilometers in the past to thousands of kilometers, which has greatly improved efficiency;SecondindividualsIt is to redistribute benefitsTraditional design is always the employee takes the small head and the company takes the big head, but Zhu Bajie.com as a platform, designers take 100% of the commission, subverting the original industry's profit distribution.
Therefore, the success of Zhu Bajie Network is because it stands on the right outlet, being a "slow" company, and then slowly boiling. In the process of waiting, continue to change and eventually win the opportunity to develop.
Step 5: Game with capital in financing
I have always believed that what I do has social value. A good entrepreneur is born a realistic romantic, and I have had a difficult psychological game with capital.
At that time, Zhu Bajie had already taken an investment quota of more than one billion, but suddenly a super boss wanted to chase us for one billion yuan, and we were ready to make an announcement, but the day before the press conference, we were forced to suppress the price. Because all the city leaders invited the next day, and the media also invited hundreds of companies, in this case,Any entrepreneur who is a little less determined will definitely collapse at the last moment, thus agreeing to such conditions.
But this super boss misestimated two things: first, the bull temper of an entrepreneur, if you say you don't sign, you won't sign, I just won't reduce the price anyway; Second, the Chongqing Municipal Government vigorously supports innovative enterprises such as Zhu Bajie.com, and the government's industrial guidance fund has received the share of the big guys. toAs for the on-site press conference, the press release was changed 4 times in a row, of course, there was also a small episode here, because everything happened unexpectedly, the press release spread fast and slow, and the change of financing figures also caused misunderstandings later. The impact of this incident on me is that I finally understand that I actHow important is the psychological strength of a founder, only if he is strong enough can he adhere to the true value in the game with capital.
Step 6: The product must be pierced with a single click
An entrepreneur is always dancing with shackles, and I generally divide the problems I encounter in the process of entrepreneurship into the following categories:
First, it is a problem that I must solve immediately, and such a problem is by no means ambiguous.
Second, the sweet trouble is that we are now financing 2.6 billion, there are too many problems that can be solved, too many choices, but we should develop more cautiously.
Third, I just can't solve this matter, and I don't have to think about solving it, so I will slowly solve it in the development.
I saw that the commission model was problematic three years ago, but I didn't know how to fix it and when. Therefore, I think such problems should be left to be solved later. If the problem of commission exemption in the business model was solved three years ago, my company may have died long ago, exempting commissions, the business model is a revolution, but there are no new investors to continue to invest, what should I do if the company is not profitable? Therefore, entrepreneurship should wait for the opportunity, and before the opportunity comes, this kind of problem is simply put on hold. If you can't solve it now, you can always solve it in the future, so you have to have such courage.
Entrepreneurship, especially in the initial stage, has too many pain points and problems that need to be solved, and it is necessary to focus on one point to break it down and become the first in a field.
For low-frequency, non-standard services:
First, do not try to standardize non-standards.
I think all entrepreneurs who do non-standard service transactions try to use the mature experience of e-commerce to standardize services. As a platform, we only need to ensure that both parties trade in good faith.
Second, don't try to solve all the problems.
One platform can't solve all the problems in this platform, you don't try to solve all the problems, it doesn't matter if you can't form a closed loop. When encountering a pit, sometimes it is not necessary to fill it, but to step over.
Founder: Never ignore feelings
A company can do things, it is really indispensable.If it weren't for the high social value of Zhu Bajie.com, I might not have insisted on doing this company. We are a company in Chongqing, which is inherently lower than that of companies in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, but I think it is because of this that we have made us. Because in Chongqing, we can survive as a slow company, employees can calm down and do their own things at work, and I have the opportunity to attract more talents with simplicity and sincerity in the process of slowing down, so far.
I think a company only has commercial value but no social value, which is what businessmen should do; If a company only has social value and no commercial value, this is the government's service to the people; Then the Zhu Bajie network we want to found, it should not only have commercial value, but also must have social value, and perfectly integrate commercial value and social value, which is worth our Zhu Bajie network team to work hard for and strive for.
Zhu Bajie.com has come to this point, which is really inseparable from the support of feelings and spirit. This is Zhu Mingyue ten years ago, in Beijing in 2006, isn't it very young? Before starting his own business, Zhu Mingyue worked as a teacher for 3 years and a reporter for 8 years. Although he is a part-time job, he is quite ruthless to himself. Behind the opponent's death, there is still product strength. Although Zhu Mingyue has dominated the non-standard and ultra-low frequency business field of crowdsourcing in the service industry, I think Zhu Bajie's biggest challenge is standardization, or how to create a product model of standard + non-standard products, a bit like the current vertical e-commerce. I see that Zhu Mingyue is fiercely entering the field of intellectual property, which is relatively standard. I hope Zhu Mingyue's 9-year history of bloody battles will be useful to you.
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Posted on 1/11/2016 10:13:52 AM
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Posted on 1/11/2016 10:50:16 AM