Changba Chen Hua: How I increased the number of Changba users to 260 million!
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I am a serial entrepreneur . My first project was in 1998 and 1999, when I was still studying computer science at Peking University. I worked on the Tianwang FTP search. It was a very early project, and it could be said to be the first generation of search engines. The project attracted probably several million users. In 2003, I worked on my second project, still at Peking University, called Skynet MAZE, which was a product for file sharing and downloading within the education network. The first two products were from my student days. In 2006, I founded my first commercial company, Kuxun Train Ticket Search. That product was also extremely amazing. It was launched on January 1, 2006, and by January 20, it had become a website ranked 2,000 worldwide. I sold this website in 2009. This is the fourth project I'm working on today. But it’s actually the second company. Just sing. Seize the moment Changba was launched on May 31, 2012. Within 5 days, it reached the number one position in the APP store without spending a penny. To this day, Changba is still growing rapidly, so what I want to share with you today is that I have been engaged in Internet-related entrepreneurship for more than ten years, and I can say that I have inadvertently hit some very core time points. Maybe you don’t realize that, in fact, the development of the entire Internet follows a very strong regularity. The strongest regularity is that it develops in waves. The most important feature of each wave’s peak is the madness of venture capital, and anyone can get the money. The first wave of Internet entrepreneurship was in 1998 and 1999. At that time, all the giants we know today were born, including BAT, Sohu, Sina, and NetEase, all in 1998 and 1999. At that time, a company could go public on the Nasdaq without having many users and gain a market value of billions of dollars without any revenue. This was the first wave of entrepreneurship in 1998 and 1999. The characteristic of the first wave of entrepreneurship was that it was about Internet enlightenment, so its main product directions were portals, search engines, infrastructure services, and so on. But in 2001, the Nasdaq bubble burst, causing the entire Internet entrepreneurship industry to stagnate for about three years. It was not until around 2004, when Baidu officially went public, that these investors suddenly felt that the economic crisis was over and that the projects they invested in five or six years ago could earn a good return. Investors felt that the opportunity had come and they should continue to invest, so China's second wave of Internet entrepreneurship emerged in 2005 and 2006. Which companies were born in 2005 and 2006? It is a product form called the UGC era. When we started our business in 2005 and 2006, everyone was focused on Web 2.0 product forms such as user participation, user contribution, and user content. In 2005 and 2006, we saw companies like Youku, 360, 58.com, Ganji, Qunar, and Kuxun , which I founded in 2006. Of course, there were some others in 2007 and 2008, but the economic crisis in 2008 put a stop to this wave. So, when will the third wave of entrepreneurship come? It was 2010 and 2011, the year when e-commerce and mobile Internet came into being. We can say that many of our lives today have been affected by this wave. For example, Meituan, Jumei, and Dianping.com, although they are old companies, it took them 10 or 11 years to truly grow. Then, mobile Internet products, such as WeChat, Momo, Changba, etc., all received funding when the companies were founded in 2010 and 2011. At that time, there was a lot of money in the capital market. What is the typical feature that can be seen in the previous three waves of entrepreneurship? That is to say, if we want to start a business, we should not do it blindly. We should find a direction that matches and is consistent with the entrepreneurial trend at that time. In fact, the entrepreneurial boom in 2010 and 2011 was not completely interrupted by the economic crisis. There have been some continuous and good entrepreneurial booms, including Internet finance and O2O that appeared last year. These two entrepreneurial points are also very good. However, I guess many people have suffered severe injuries from stock speculation. It can be said that if this wave of stock market declines very sharply, it may bring about a new round of economic crisis. What will happen when an economic crisis comes? All investors will be very cautious. They think that the market value of listed companies has dropped so low, so why can a startup company like you have such a high valuation? Therefore, cash is king. I will not easily invest money in anyone. In other words, during an economic crisis, starting a business will be more difficult. So I think that it is possible that in another half a year, the previous wave of entrepreneurship will completely disappear, and then everyone will have to endure for another one or two years, or two or three years, before a new wave will slowly begin to emerge. So I think it’s actually very easy to get the hang of things like Internet entrepreneurship which come in waves. If you think, how do I know when there is a trend and when there is a wave of entrepreneurship? In fact, the most important thing is that we read the news and see that a certain company claims to have raised money. Then you sort out all the companies that have received money and are in the news, and what type of business they are doing. The news appears there, which means that this is the era, and the opportunity has come to you. But we don’t necessarily have to do the same thing as others. Each wave of entrepreneurship is actually a large field. It is not a very narrow product direction. So what can we do in such a large field? This brings up another issue, which is the choice of direction. Direction selection The first question is about seizing the opportunity. Maybe when you feel that the time has come for starting a business, you should start a business. The second question is what direction should I go in. As for what direction to go, on the one hand, as I just said, you should go to the capital market to see what big categories can make money. For example, in 2010 and 2011, mobile Internet e-commerce was a very large field. You can do B2C e-commerce, C2C, or various other things, like group buying and other lifestyle e-commerce. The mobile Internet is also very large. You can make friends with strangers on Momo, or make friends with acquaintances on WeChat. There are also various other ways, such as voice dating, voice dating on Changba, singing dating, etc. You can do it in many directions. So how do we find this direction? In fact, it is not easy to find the direction, and there are actually only a handful of good directions. Let me give you a few examples. I just mentioned that I have worked on four projects, and fortunately, these four projects have all achieved a very large user scale. The first direction I worked on was called Tianwang FTP Search. At that time, there were many official FTP websites on the entire Internet. These websites provided upload functions, so they contained a lot of content. However, this content was very scattered, and each independent site was difficult to find. So we provided a search engine service to aggregate these contents together, making it easy for users to find all kinds of very good content. But this is just one point. It is actually not that easy to fully understand this point and make it useful. In order to make this thing easy to use, we provide a large number of functions, such as vector detection, account sharing, etc., to enrich the product, so that it can attract a large number of users due to the scarcity of resources. But when I first started working on this project, I don’t think it was a direction I took the initiative to look for. It was more like this was a direction that the laboratory I was in at the time thought of, so I did it. But the second project, Skynet MAZE, was a direction I found myself. How did this direction come about? It was because when I was maintaining my original Skynet FTP search, I found that there were fewer and fewer resources on the market. A large number of FTP websites had traffic and account limits, making the user experience worse and worse, to the point where you basically couldn't use it. At this time, I felt very painful, and I said, why must the file sharing network be like this? Can we create a completely different sharing network? In this sharing network, although there are still account limits and queues, I can definitely download what I want. So if I want to solve this problem, the best way is to fill the entire Internet with a variety of resources. So, my Skynet MAZE product does a very interesting thing, which is to contribute everyone's computer and make it a server similar to FTP. In this way, the resources in the entire market will be abundant enough. However, simply providing such a product will not allow this ecosystem to prosper, so we have designed a very beautiful points system. The more people download your shared hard drive, the higher your points will be. When your points are higher, when you download other people's things, you will get priority rights, which allows you to download other people's content first. By 2004 and 2005, this product accounted for about 80 to 90 percent of Peking University's export bandwidth, and had about five to six million users at the time. But these are all products I made during my school years. The first product I officially commercialized was called Kuxun Train Ticket Search. How did you find this direction? Actually, I encountered a problem at the end of 2004. I wanted to go home, but I couldn’t buy a train ticket because train tickets were too scarce in the market. But I also discovered a feature. That is, in various forums, such as Tianya, Shuimu, 58, Ganji, these classified information websites and forums, there is a lot of information about train ticket transfers and a lot of information about train ticket purchases. Well, I said since I can't buy a train ticket, can I make a small tool to capture all this information in a program, because this information is on the web page and anyone can see it. I use a program to simulate human vision, and I can capture these contents. I made a tool before, but I felt that the tool could only be used by me. So in 2006, I made something very bold. I made it into a website, provided services to everyone, and then built a very beautiful marketing tool on it. What is this marketing method? I said that there are so many people in this world who cannot buy train tickets, and so many people are transferring train tickets, and they all leave a mobile phone number during the buying and selling process. OK, I will send a text message to all those who want to buy train tickets or seek to buy train tickets, telling them how many pieces of information there are on Kuxun about people transferring the corresponding train tickets. Send a text message to all the transferees saying, come to Kuxun, there are a lot of people who want to buy your train tickets. Coupled with Kuxun's real-time search engine, it is easy for everyone to buy the transfer train ticket information posted by others just one minute ago. So this website was launched on January 1, 2006, and by January 20, 2006, in just 20 days, it had become one of the top 2000 websites in the world, and this led to my first entrepreneurial venture. When this website came out, I hadn't set up a company yet. There was only me and a partner, two of us, no company, no team, and no money, but it has become a website ranked among the top 2,000 in the world. It can be said that the previous few times were a bit like saying, OK, I accidentally made a product, and then others forced me to start a business, right? But Changba is not like that. Changba is a direction that is completely screened out by the elimination method. What is screening method? Before we started Changba, our team worked on three or four strange directions that were particularly unreliable. So at the end of 2011, our team of ten did nothing for about two months. What did we do every week? We say, look for the direction we should go. How to find? First, we discovered that mobile Internet is a big wave, and we want to make mobile Internet products. Second, our team has natural experience in search engines, e-commerce, and life. Okay, let’s say we combine these things together and see if we can find a good direction. In fact, if we completely combined our original resume, we couldn't find anything after searching for a long time. So we said, let go of your imagination and think about everything that can be done, as long as it is in line with the direction of this entrepreneurial trend. The entrepreneurial trend at that time was mobile Internet. So what do we do? I said, go to the global APP Store and look at all the free lists and the top 20 products in each category, and see if there are any products with the following characteristics. The first characteristic is that the market size is large enough. Second, are there any giants in this product direction? Third, can we create a refreshing product form in this direction? Another point is that startups are short of money. Therefore, among all the options we had at the time, we were judging whether this product direction had the ability to spread its own word-of-mouth. What is the ability to spread word of mouth? In terms of product form, it is natural that after one person uses it, he or she will actively tell the friends around him or her, thus achieving the goal of rapid growth by spreading the word from one to ten, and from ten to a hundred. If it does not have this kind of autonomous word-of-mouth communication capability, you will have to spend a lot of money to buy initial users, and the cost is very high. A few other points, how big can it be in this direction in the future? Whose money can it make? Who will be our future paying users? Is it the general users, the advertisers, or the games ? Is there a relatively large space for imagination, so that this direction can not only attract users but also make money? These are probably a few ideas. We thought of about ten or twenty directions at the time, and three or four new directions popped up every week. Then, of the ten directions discussed last week, half of them were cut off because after screening them, there were always some directions that we felt we should not do, so we cut them off. Then we found that there was a direction called singing that remained on the list and was not eliminated. Why? When we were thinking about this direction at Changba, we found that some people were already making some karaoke tools that were very popular. When we looked at those products, we found that they had several characteristics: First, the companies that originally made such products basically still treated it as a traditional software. What is the idea of a software company? The software company’s idea is that, first of all, what I make is a tool. If you want to use my tool, you have to pay. So the product we saw at that time was a tool for singing. You had to pay a few dollars for each song, and only a very small number of songs could be sung for free. Even under such harsh conditions, it still made it to the top of some charts, so we found that this is a good direction. You charge, I provide it for free, but it is definitely not enough for your product to be just a tool. We think that tools are actually a very good way to attract users. If you say that you are the best tool of a certain type in the world, many users will come in, but the competition threshold for tools is very low. If you can make tools, others can make tools, and giants can make tools even better. What is sticky? Social relationships are sticky. Once this connection is established between two people, it can be preserved for a long time. Let users come, let users stay So when we were looking at the direction of singing, we came up with a few ideas. First of all, let’s say, I want to make the best karaoke tool in the world. What are the problems with other people’s karaoke tools? What should we make it like? The problem we solve is: first, all songs are free; second, the music library is large enough; third, all sounds are beautified, and the sound of your singing should be better than you imagined. This is really a bit like Meitu XiuXiu for sound. To be honest, it is the Meitu XiuXiu of sound. If you sing on Kugou today, you will find that the recorded sound is often much better than you imagined. This is because we have a lot of engineers who spend a lot of energy on sound processing. This is called innovation at the tool level. The second level is social. Just now I said, why do we need to build social network? Because tools do not have strong barriers, they are often quickly surpassed by others. So how do you play socially? The most important thing is to solve a problem, which is what I just said, that is, this product must have the ability to spread itself. In order to achieve this ability, Changba has made a very beautiful design, which is the chart-making. Singing is naturally combined with chart-topping. Changba provides a large number of charts. After I finish singing a song, I will go to the charts . In order to promote itself, Changba has designed several very beautiful product details. The first product detail is that when a person finishes singing a song using your karaoke tool, he feels very, very lonely. Then we tell him that you have defeated 99 percent of people in the country. In fact, it is impossible for anyone to give you a score after you finish singing a song. Only the system can give you a score. After the system gives you a score, you will feel very happy. Okay, there is a sharing button below, share to Weibo, share to Moments, share anywhere. So you can see that if you go to Weibo or QQ space today and search for "Sing Bar", you will see a large number of people sharing their own songs. In fact, there may not be anyone listening, but they are really happy. This is the first wave of active dissemination, because as soon as the user finishes singing, the system will immediately tell you that you sang really well, and he will share it. What is the second wave of transmission? Once you've shared, your friends will come in, right? If your friends come in, some of them will think that you sing well and give you a thumbs up or send you flowers. Well, since some people said that I sang well, why shouldn’t I be on the list? The list is there, and I must get on it, so the second wave of spread appeared. What is the driving force behind the second wave of transmission? In order to get on the list, I would ask all my friends around me, my QQ group, my WeChat group , hey, I released a song, please come and send me flowers, if they don’t send me flowers, you are not my friend. This is the second wave of active dissemination. In order to get on the list, users bring in all their friends. Things get even more interesting when it comes to the third wave of transmission. When there is someone who sings really well or looks really good, he will have a bunch of fans. These people may not be his friends, but a bunch of strangers. These strangers like him very much. They feel satisfied if they can listen to a song you sing every day. I won’t be able to sleep tonight if I don’t listen to you sing. There are a lot of people like this. Don't laugh at this. In real life, there are really a lot of idol worshippers among strangers. This kind of worship allows these people to love someone from the bottom of their hearts, so we have achieved the third wave of active dissemination. The third wave is when the person I like is kicked off the top of the list by another person, I can’t stand it anymore and I have to get all my relatives and friends to vote for the person I like. This is what Changba calls the third degree of word-of-mouth communication. So we use this kind of powerful tools, strong social interaction, and proactive dissemination. We found that it would be unreasonable for a product like Changba not to be popular. So our product was launched on May 31, 2012, and reached number one in the APP Store in 5 days. Without spending a penny, we gained 1 million users in 10 days, 10 million users in 80 days, and 100 million users in 1 and a half years. We now have 260 million users. The growth of this product has exceeded our imagination. We ourselves could not have imagined that it could grow so fast. What points did we grasp? First, timing. 2012 was an explosive year for mobile Internet. If you go back and check, the year when Xiaomi mobile phones sold the best was 2012. Momo also achieved great growth in 2012, and WeChat was also launched in 2012. Why are 2012 and 2013 such big growth points? It's because when everyone switched from their original feature phones to smartphones, they became very, very hungry. He wants to find some fun applications and install them. So when a new platform appears, the strongest demand is entertainment. Because when I bought a new mobile phone, the first thing I thought about was how to play with it, and then how to use it. So in 2012 and 2013, the so-called mobile e-commerce and mobile life services were too early, but mobile entertainment was particularly suitable. At that point in time, a new platform emerged and everyone had a need for entertainment. Another point is that our product has strong inherent utility. We don’t need to educate users about what KTV is. I just tell them that I am the best KTV in the world, and then a lot of people will come in. Second, after entering the market, we achieved widespread word-of-mouth communication through our active dissemination of this product design system. At that time, Changba had just been online for a few weeks when Zhang Xiaolong from WeChat came to me and asked, "How did you spread this product?" I went to a barber and he was playing with your products, and I didn't see any of your ads. Then I went to Guangzhou and explained to him how Changba was done. I think the most important point is that we should look to see if there are any pain points in our lives, and whether there are some pain points in the world that have been discovered by others but not dug so deeply. Then we should seize this pain point and combine it with the wave of investment and entrepreneurship in this era. Chen Hua’s online speech: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTMzMTM3MjgzNg==.html You can go and have a look if you need! APP Top Promotion (www.opp2.com) is the top mobile application promotion platform in China, focusing on mobile application promotion operation methods, experience and skills, channel ASO optimization ranking, and sharing App marketing dry goods . Welcome to follow the official WeChat public account : appganhuo This article is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Reprinting this article must be approved by Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article! |
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