[Latest] What did Fenda do right to be valued at over 100 million US dollars 24 days after its launch?

Yesterday at noon, I saw in my circle of friends that Ji Shisan released the latest financing news of Fenda, saying that Xing&Fenda had obtained the latest round of financing with a valuation of over 100 million US dollars.

In today’s age of mass entrepreneurship , news of a financing with a valuation of over 100 million US dollars comes out every day. However, this time it is very special. On the one hand, it is because this is already the largest financing in the field of experience and skills exchange . On the other hand, what makes people admire it is that this popular product has only been online for 24 days !

What did Fenda, an app that has been all over the WeChat Moments, do right? What inspiration can it give us?

Putting aside too much speculation about Fenda's corporate strategy, and not talking about the rise of the knowledge-sharing economy, let's review Fenda's actual product iteration and operation to see what practical inspirations and references we can get from it for those of us who are working on products and operations. The following are my personal analysis and I welcome your comments.

Inspiration 1: Minimum cost lean iteration

According to Zhu Xiaohua, product director of Fenda, the idea of ​​Fenda came from the discussion of a lightweight knowledge exchange platform. Ji Shisan wanted to make a voice question and answer system. It only took one week from the decision to the official launch of the product.

The first version of Fenda was very simple and crude, with only the most basic questioning and eavesdropping functions, and there were also many bugs, but this did not affect the launch of the product to verify user needs.

This method of producing a minimum viable product (MVP) at the lowest cost and in the shortest time is one of the core elements of lean iteration.

As shown in the figure above, the correct agile iteration should be that the product of each step is the minimum viable product. Although the first version is far from the final car , it is also a means of transportation that can roll.

When starting a business, most ideas come from the founder's flash of inspiration. In most cases, when they are put on the market for verification, it is found that users have no demand. The time and energy for starting a business are limited, so the verification cycle should be shortened as much as possible.

Making an MVP at the lowest cost can help verify whether user needs are reliable as soon as possible. If user feedback is good, you can continue to increase investment. If there is a problem with user feedback, you can also make timely adjustments to avoid wasting more energy.

After Fenda was launched, the team immediately invited some experts they had accumulated before and began to release the product on some channels. Since the product itself was interesting and contagious, it quickly became popular in the circle of friends. The rapid growth of users also exceeded the team's expectations, and they then devoted all their efforts to product iteration.

After going online, the Fenda team basically maintained the pace of releasing at least 3 new versions every day . How did they do it?

In addition to the team's awareness of lean iteration, the choice of product form is also the basis for rapid product iteration. The first version of Fenda was not a mobile client, but an H5 page used in the WeChat environment , which completed notification, payment and other services through a service account.

Compared with directly developing mobile clients, developing based on WeChat service accounts has several very obvious advantages:

1. Low user cost: no need to download the client, just open the web page to use it.
2. Low development cost: The development of iOS and Android clients doubles the workload, and there are also various adaptations.
3. Low iteration cost: There is no need to submit a new version to the application market . Users can download the installation package to update, and the iteration is completed by directly updating the server. Users are completely unaware of the iteration.

Developing with the H5 version greatly reduces development and iteration costs. In the WeChat environment, although the entrance is deep, the notification and transaction closed loops are complete.

The much-criticized WeChat browser kernel also underwent a major upgrade in May, and the performance of products developed based on it has become increasingly powerful. The Instant App released at Google I/O last month also indicates that the development cost of this more lightweight product MVP will become lower and lower in the future.

When it comes to lean iteration, many excellent startups today use lean startup methods to verify the market in the early stages, which are worthy of our study and reference. Zappos, the largest e-commerce shoe company in the United States, did not purchase goods immediately after building its website. In order to verify whether there was a demand for buying shoes online, they waited for someone to place an order and then went directly to the physical store to buy the shoes before mailing them to the customer. At the beginning, all Airbnb had online were three airbeds in the founder's living room. The most impressive is Dropbox, which is valued at $4 billion. It first made a video describing the service it wanted to provide, and without doing anything else , it discovered based on the number of clicks on the video that this product would have great user demand, so it began to invest in development.

All of these stories tell us that when starting a business in the Internet era, we must carry out lean iterations at the lowest possible cost.

Inspiration 2: Lower the user threshold as much as possible

When talking about Fenda, we have to talk about the development history of Zaixing, the product before Fenda. It has been online for more than a year. On the surface, Zaixing's products are booming, but in fact, this year should have been very difficult .

I am an in-depth user of Zaixing . I have used Zaixing to make appointments with experts 10 times. I also paid to ask 8 questions worth 50 yuan in the internal beta of the "Zhi" function this year. I have browsed the Zhi list. I should be one of the users who use this function the most.

Objectively speaking, I really like Zaixing's products. I think the experts above are very professional. The actual experience of making an appointment with an expert is also very good. I have also benefited a lot from meeting with experts through Zaixing in my personal growth.

The Zaixing team has done a good job in operation. The activities planned by Zaixing are very good in terms of creativity, fun and style. The cooperation with Uber and the 1 yuan appointment with Michelle Chen have accumulated some popularity in a short period of time. The number of Zaixing users has also accumulated to 1 million within a year and is still growing.

But when others asked me about Zaixing, I have always been pessimistic about its development. The biggest pain point is that "users are not active enough" and " the conversion rate is too low" .

Why does a product with a good product experience and seemingly good operations have problems with low product activity and low conversion rate?

Ultimately, it is because the product has too few usage scenarios and the usage threshold is too high.

Offline 1-on-1 appointments are a very low-frequency activity with a high threshold. The following conditions must be met for this appointment transaction to occur:

• Users have bigger problems that they cannot solve themselves
• This question cannot be answered by searching
• There happens to be an expert in this field in the industry
• The expert's introduction and description give users a sense of trust
• This expert and the user happen to be in the same city
• Experts and users have time
• Users need to pay two to three hundred yuan for an appointment
• Experts need to understand the situation in advance and prepare for the appointment

The threshold for experts to join the industry is actually quite high . From the initial application to filling out the information, to obtain final approval, it is necessary to repeatedly modify the information and obtain recommendations from existing experts. In short, the threshold to become an expert is very high.

Of course, it is right to do so, as it ensures that the big names in the industry are truly qualified. On the contrary, if the threshold is very low, paying hundreds of yuan on the Internet and then feeling it is not worth it after the meeting and chatting is very detrimental to the user experience.

Some of my friends who are experts told me that the industry has high requirements for the content of the introduction, and they often need to send the introduction back for rewriting. After the experts finish writing, they need to revise and confirm it again by the operations team. In short, the process is very long.

Moreover, in the early days, the industry had to pay to send a professional photography team to take professional photos for the experts on site, and the cost was extremely high.

For the reasons mentioned above, it is very costly and has a high threshold to expand the business among experts in the industry.

Not only that, there are also many big names that were recruited with great effort, but there is also a lot of loss. Since these big names in the industry already have high incomes because of their abilities, spending 2 hours to meet with a stranger and only earning a few hundred yuan is not a very cost-effective thing considering the time cost of the industry.

In addition to the social interaction that dating can bring, the experts' gains and sense of freshness will also decrease quickly. After getting tired of dating a few times, the experts will choose to go offline and become invisible, gradually fading out of the platform.

Big names will only help out once or twice, for example, you can no longer make an appointment with Michelle Chen if you use Zaixing.

The cost of attracting active users is also very high . Appointment coupons are often distributed during holidays to attract business. New registered users can also receive a 50-yuan coupon that can directly reduce the appointment fee.

Since Zaixing needs to pay the appointment fees to the experts according to the public price, the coupon amount of Zaixing is equivalent to the actual subsidy paid by the company. According to my rough calculation, the direct subsidy cost that Zaixing spent on me as a user is about 800 yuan (holiday discounts, registration discounts for introducing friends, etc.).

If Zaixing wants to take 10% of the appointment income from the Xings in the future, in order for Zaixing to earn back the 800 yuan, I will need to make another 8,000 yuan. If I maintain my love and curiosity for Zaixing's products, it will take me about 2 years to make a profit. It can be seen that the Zaixing project still has a long way to go before it can make a profit.

Although using subsidies to increase user activity is effective, the cost is very high. What’s more frightening is that when there are no preferential subsidies, user activity will drop sharply .

Even though the marketing, operations, and public relations teams had done a great job, planned many interesting activities, and even CCTV reported on it three times, it was still difficult to get out of these difficulties.

Domestic and similar platforms in the industry, such as Yewen, Dakashuo, Hi Seniors, After Eight, and Role Model, have also encountered similar difficulties.

The team at the bank realized this problem and found that offline one-on-one appointments were too "heavy" . This year, they began to explore other directions in the field of knowledge sharing. The general direction was to build a " lightweight knowledge and skills trading platform " in the hope of gradually lowering the threshold for appointments.

In this direction, Bank of China relaxed its original adherence to offline appointments and launched nationwide voice call online chat . From the user reviews of Bank of China, we can see that the launch of online voice chat did not bring about a blowout growth in transactions. People still seem to be more willing to accept the experience of offline appointments. Most users still find it difficult to accept that spending hundreds of yuan for a one-hour phone call without meeting in person. In the exploration of using voice chat to move towards lightweight knowledge sharing, it cannot be said to be a complete failure, but it certainly cannot be said to be a success.

Later, I received an invitation to the "Zhi" function that was being tested internally. I quite like this function. From the original selection of expert topics, it has become a method where I raise confusing questions, and different experts rush to take the lead, and then answer them through voice chat. On average, there will be 2-4 experts rushing to take the lead for each question, and they will attach reasons why they rush to take the lead. It feels really good to have experts take the initiative to solve the problem as long as you pay.

The model in which users actively ask questions and experts take over the orders has expanded the scope of questions users can ask from "existing expert topics" to "user-defined", which has greatly broadened the scope .

However, this also had many problems. For example, in order to allow more experts to grab the orders, the questioner was slow to choose an expert, which gave the experts a very bad experience. Later, it was upgraded to select an expert within 48 hours or the answer would expire. Before the Zhi function was upgraded, a big thing happened - Zhihu suddenly became popular.

I guess the popularity of Zhihu in early April inspired the product development of the Zaixing team. A more lightweight knowledge sharing can be done directly in the WeChat environment, and the knowledge of knowledge contributors can be reused by more people to create more profits. However, the popularity of version 1.0 did not last long, and the novelty soon wore off and the popularity quickly dropped. The short-term popularity of Zhihu also helped educate the market about "paying a small amount to gain knowledge and experience."

On this basis, Fenda made two most important innovations - "60-second voice answer" and "equal sharing of eavesdropping profits between questioners and answerers " . These two core changes have changed the way the entire product is played.

In terms of the communication threshold, meeting > phone call > text message > WeChat text > WeChat voice, Fenda suddenly changed the communication form from meeting with the highest threshold to WeChat voice. Moreover, for fans of some "stars" and " internet celebrities ", hearing their voices will feel very familiar and real. This is why Fenda changed its slogan from "Voice Q&A worth paying for" to "Go to Fenda and listen to him say it in person."

What’s even more clever is that Fenda has set a 60-second limit on the length of the answer voice, which has several advantages:

• The cost of answering questions is very low, and it is easier than typing.
• Due to the short time, the answerer will consciously extract the essence
• The questioner knows that the question only lasts 60 seconds and does not have high expectations for the depth of the content.

This 60-second limit is comparable to the 140-character limit that Weibo lowered in the past, making blogs, which were originally only accessible to those with writing skills, suddenly become a product that everyone can participate in, and Weibo quickly became popular; 360 Antivirus has installed itself on hundreds of millions of computers by lowering the threshold for paying for genuine antivirus software; and the Android system has captured 83.7% of the mobile phone system market share (US IDC forecast data) by allowing mobile phone manufacturers to use it for free.

On the basis of balancing the experience or even optimizing the experience, the benefits brought by lowering the usage threshold are huge.

One of the reasons why many people were attracted to Fenda is that hundreds of celebrities such as Wang Sicong, Zhang Ziyi, Tong Dawei, Wang Feng, Papi Jiang, and Luo Zhenyu have joined, which has brought Fenda huge exposure and attention.

This is definitely because Fenda has done a good job in terms of connections and BD, but have you ever thought about it? The same team means the same resources, so why didn’t so many celebrities come to support it during its period?

It is indeed because the threshold for joining Fenda is really low. You don’t need to fill in information, and you don’t need to set aside time for offline appointments. You only need to take a few minutes in fragmented time to answer fans’ questions. The threshold for this kind of effort is basically very low . So, combined with the personal connections that the team already has, Fenda can easily expand its membership by inviting celebrities to answer questions.

Is the threshold for using your own product high? Is the industry threshold high? Are there any benefits to lowering the threshold? Is there any way to lower the usage threshold? If you think it through, you might find a great opportunity.

Inspiration 3: Make all participants win-win

In the knowledge transfer system, there are two roles, one is the knowledge contributor and the other is the knowledge receiver. Fenda uses the mechanism of "the benefits of eavesdropping are equally shared by the questioner and the answerer" to cleverly activate the win-win situation of both parties.

First of all, Fenda requires Q&A to have a payment threshold, because the requirement of payment can screen out a group of freeloaders and low-quality questions. I often receive invitations to ask questions on Zhihu, and I also receive many questions in the background of the official account. Some of the questions are really poorly asked. They are either very vague questions or questions that can be answered by search.

Since asking questions requires payment, people will ask them more seriously , which filters out a lot of low-level questions and makes the Q&A environment much more comfortable.

Monetary rewards will motivate respondents. Even if they don't make much money, they will feel that their knowledge is respected and valuable.

Secondly, Fenda divides the role of knowledge receiver into two roles: questioner and eavesdropper. The eavesdropper can eavesdrop on other people's questions and answers, which greatly expands the scope of knowledge sharing.

In our previous products "Zhi" and "Dagong", questions and answers were all point-to-point, and the efficiency of knowledge dissemination was actually quite low. If experts faced similar questions and needed to answer them repeatedly, their sense of accomplishment would decrease quickly. The use of the "eavesdropping" function reduces the repetitive work of respondents.

Most importantly, the proceeds from each eavesdropper are split equally between the questioner and the answerer. The thought of possibly earning back the question fee greatly promotes the enthusiasm of the questioner and also lowers the psychological threshold for asking questions.

Since being eavesdropped on will generate subsequent income, the questioner will actively share the question and answer link to their friends circle and WeChat groups . This will bring more traffic to the Fenda platform, more eavesdroppers, and more answerers and questioners.

At the same time, as a knowledge sharing platform that claims to "create knowledge-based internet celebrities" and "make money while lying down", various knowledge-based big Vs have begun to promote their Fenda QR codes in their personal circles of friends and public accounts, perhaps in order to try out this interesting product or to get a place on the talent list.

Since these big Vs are themselves KOLs (opinion leaders) in their respective fields, the products they recommend will make fans more eager to try. Fans can usually only passively receive pushed articles, but now they can spend about 10 yuan to ask questions to the big names they admire, and maybe they can even earn it back, so many fans start to enter Fenda to start asking questions.

The questioner, the answerer, and the eavesdropper all gain a win-win situation and benefit from each other , allowing Fenda's entire user and content ecosystem to become self-operated.

Inspiration Four Focus on Core Function Optimization

For Fenda, what is the core process to meet user needs?

It means that users find experts and issues that interest them, and then ask questions or eavesdrop.

Therefore, in Fenda's 24-day iteration, the iteration of major functions revolves around this core, rather than wasting time developing some irrelevant and fancy functions.

Let’s take a closer look at what Fenda has iterated on:

1. Talent list, newcomer list, search, listen, generate personal QR code, big V identity authentication, etc. are all designed to help users better discover people of interest.

2. Limited-time free listening, 6-hour free listening, worth listening, I listen, pinned questions, selected questions and answers, etc. are all designed to allow users to better discover content of interest.

Invest the most limited resources in the most core strategy!

In the process of doing business, there will always be subsequent imitators following; this time Fenda is very popular, and it is inevitable that there will be more followers. How to build product and user barriers in the shortest time is the most critical strategic choice, and Fenda has done a good job in this regard.

Conclusion

In the field of knowledge monetization, Fenda made a lot of right choices in the past month, and it is half a step ahead. It has indeed done a great job in this battle.

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