2 years, 500 million users, the operating secrets of Wi-Fi Master Key

The Internet industry emphasizes speed and iteration and updating. However, there is one company that is an exception. It is called WIFI Master Key and has over 500 million users. Many people are familiar with this product, but if you mention the founder of this product, few people can match him. But his name is known to many people, and his brother is even more well-known, Chen Tianqiao, the founder of Shanda Network; and the founder of this product is Chen Tianqiao's younger brother - Chen Danian.

Chen Danian, who had never appeared in public, finally could not sit still when the number of users of WiFi Master Key exceeded 500 million, and dedicated his first platform and public appearance to this product. How did they achieve 500 million users in two years without any financing or promotion? Chen Danian is trying a completely different mobile path. Can the mobile Internet beat the fast by going slow? Can tool-type apps break free from the curse of commercialization?

In Chen Danian's view, it all depends on the philosophy of Tai Chi. Tai Chi emphasizes the combination of hardness and softness. When it is soft, it is particularly soft, and when it is hard, it is indestructible. It also uses the method of slow to fast, and accumulation and release. Since the beginning of his business, Chen Danian has positioned Master Key as a slow company, ready to go... Liu Hongjun, a reporter from "Business Value", conducted a further detailed interview. The full text will be published in BT Media ▪ "Business Value" magazine March issue, and the first online release of Titanium Media:

WiFi Master Key made its first high-profile appearance with an eye-catching number - 500 million users, 230 million monthly active users, and a maximum daily number of 2 million new users. According to this data, the product has become the third most downloaded mobile Internet product after WeChat and QQ, and the team has only 36 people so far.

Chen Danian, the founder of WiFi Master Key, has multiple identities. He is Chen Tianqiao's younger brother, the founder and director of Shanda Network, an investor in many companies such as Guokr Electronics and Qingju Crowdfunding, and a frequent visitor on the Chinese rich list. But he describes himself as "an old programmer who met an opportunity." Two years ago, he started his second business, spending 99% of his energy on polishing the product of WiFi Master Key.

After achieving financial freedom, Chen Danian's life fell into a long period of confusion. He likes photography, and after buying the best photography equipment, he suddenly didn't know what to do. There are two things that have the greatest influence on Chen Danian's life - Buddhism and Tai Chi. The former makes him happy, and the latter makes him enlightened. His grasp of the company's rhythm is in line with his enlightenment in Tai Chi.

After 16 years of silence and owning 4 listed companies, Chen Danian's first platform and public appearance was dedicated to WiFi Master Key. This is also a very interesting time point. Not long ago, Tencent launched WeChat to connect to WiFi. After users connect to Alipay's WiFi, they can receive push merchant advertisements. Prior to this, Internet companies such as Cheetah and 360 have announced their entry into the free WiFi market.

Although competition in the mobile Internet has become a red ocean, there are few successful tool apps. Can tool-type apps break free from the curse of commercialization? Can the mobile Internet beat the fast with the slow? For two years, without any financing or promotion, Chen Danian tried a completely different mobile path.

Use slowness to defeat speed, strike back and win

Tai Chi is a kind of philosophical thought and the oldest concept of Yin and Yang in China. Li Lei followed Chen Danian to create WiFi Master Key in the early days and is now the company's vice president. He is the last disciple of Chen-style Tai Chi and also the Tai Chi teacher of Chen Danian. Chen-style Tai Chi emphasizes the combination of hardness and softness. When it is soft, it is particularly soft, and when it is hard, it is indestructible. It also follows the principle of slow beating followed by fast, and accumulation and release.

Accumulation is a slow process of exerting force, and also a process of experiencing one's own state. From the beginning of his business, Chen Danian positioned Master Key as a slow company.

"All I've done today is hold the company back."

Chen Danian said. In a meeting that ended before the interview, a young man in the team thought a system was too grand. His job was to constantly cut down overly ambitious ideas. In the two years since the project started, we have been constantly working to solve the core pain point of "connection".

The first step to connect to WiFi is to determine the signal strength, which is the basis for connecting to WiFi. If the user's mobile phone signal is below 20%, the signal is too weak and the user is not recommended to connect. It was a simple judgment, but the team did something very sophisticated.

Among the many Android brands, some mobile phones are designed to pretend that the signal strength is very good, so the signal strength given is not accurate - some mobile phones can only be connected at 30% signal strength, and some mobile phones can be connected at 20%. In order to accurately determine at which signal strength value of 20-30% a mobile phone can connect to WiFi, the technical team tested the signal strength of each of the 1,000 Android phones on the market, gave the parameter values ​​for each phone, and established a database for users to refer to.

Just taking the Internet connection as an example, Chen Danian divided it into 12 parts, which is only one twelfth of it.

Li Lei divides the development of WiFi Master Key into four stages:

The concept of WiFi Master Key is to become a WiFi sharing platform. However, the early user pool was small. After users downloaded the product, they found that there were few WiFi networks that could be shared and the retention rate was low. Therefore, WiFi Master Key carried out some activities in the initial stage, such as a lottery mechanism for winning an iPad by sharing WiFi for free, to encourage sharing.

In the early days, a group of users never uninstalled the app, thus entering the second stage of development. For users who have not uninstalled, once it succeeds once, it will start to spread. But how to improve the connection success rate and stability is the 12 steps that Chen Danian proposed to achieve excellence.

At a stage when user retention rates were not high, the team began to investigate user pain points. Three days, 10 people, all of them were calling users. After all 1,000 calls were made, the team listed the problems one by one and made improvements one by one.

Li Lei discovered that more than 7,000 students in a school suddenly downloaded their product because the owner of a small noodle restaurant in front of the school shared his WiFi. This ushered in a rapid growth in users, and as the amount of data on the platform increased, more hot spots emerged.

In the third stage, there are some hot spots that can be seen by many users, but cannot be solved by sharing. No user can share hot spots such as CMCC or ChinaNet. Chen Danian began spending several million a month to purchase operators' WiFi and provide it to users for free in order to increase ubiquitous hotspot services.

Nowadays, WiFi Master Key has begun to cooperate with offline WiFi laying companies, such as Koala, Gaopeng, etc. After these companies set up WiFi hotspots, they found that many users did not know how to connect. Users found that the connection process was cumbersome and the failure rate was high, which was not conducive to the commercial monetization capabilities and number of active users of such companies. Therefore, they found a master key, gave them some advertising displays, and ensured that users could connect to WiFi with one click to lower the connection threshold.

In the past two years of entrepreneurship, the core problem that WiFi Master Key has solved is "connection success rate". This is all the energy that Chen Danian has put into this project over the past two years. The entire team was constantly working on a math problem: a reservoir has an inlet and outlet. The inlet is naturally enlarging, so how can we make the outlet narrower and narrower so that users will naturally stay?

Today, the connection success rate has risen from the initial 0.01% to 70%, and has gained 500 million users through word-of-mouth communication. This is also the method of slow beating fast that Chen Danian advocates, accumulating strength and waiting for release.

Chen Danian repeatedly emphasized internally that the first priority is to make a good product and not to consider monetization and profitability within a few years. This may also be related to the fact that WiFi Master Key had no previous financing and was not short of money. Wang Xiaoshu, vice president of WiFi Master Key, who has known Chen Danian for ten years, recalled, "We are a private enterprise, and the boss himself is not particularly keen on making money, so the people below do not have much pressure."

Currently, Master Key’s profit model is limited to monetizing mobile alliance traffic, making it the largest partner of Tencent Guangdiantong and Baidu Mobile Advertising Alliance. In their team of 36 people, only half of them are working to generate revenue, while the other half is responsible for promotion in various channels.

There are now 120 million WiFi hotspots providing Internet access. In mid-January, WiFi Master Key released its IOS version, which climbed to the top of the tool list and the third place in the free list in just five days.

At this point in time, the three Internet giants BAT arrived, and a new market opportunity also came.

3.65 billion free traffic

There is a saying in Tai Chi: "Don't lose, don't push, don't stretch or contract by yourself." "Throw" means that the hands of two people have left each other. Tai Chi cannot hit the target from a distance. It needs physical contact to judge the opponent's physical strength and the direction of attack. "Push" means that I can beat you away just because I am strong. In the product strategy of WiFi Master Key, "not losing" means studying the strengths of other products; "not competing" means not going against other products, being a partner with everyone, and not competing head-on with BAT.

Last year, Meituan launched "Meituan WiFi", Tencent acquired the commercial WiFi Maiwai Di, and WeChat also launched free WiFi; after users enter the Alipay free WiFi, they can automatically receive merchant information. A battle for offline WiFi access has already begun.

This was the first time in 16 years since Chen Danian started his career that he launched a product in public, attracting more than 800 O2O companies. The venue originally only had more than 200 seats.

There is also a rule in Tai Chi philosophy that is to strike back and gain the upper hand. The premise is not to compete with others for temporary victory or defeat. As long as it does not cause fatal harm, you don't have to care. Wait for the best opportunity, and once your opponent shows a weakness, use all your strength to knock him down.

A year ago, WiFi Master Key quietly launched a feature. When the user connects to the hotspot, he will ask for help in completing the hotspot information, such as which business the hotspot belongs to, whether it is a hotel or restaurant, as well as basic information such as location and name. Based on the information provided by users, in-depth data mining is performed to calculate the subordinate locations of more hotspots. More than 1 billion precise coordinates of hotspots have now been established.

At the press conference, Li Lei, vice president of WiFi Master Key, made the following calculation:

"We provide 1.7 billion hotspot connections. The price of 1,000 impressions (i.e. one CPM) to users is said to be 60 or even 100 yuan in the industry, but we calculate it based on a very low base of 6 yuan. 1.7 billion impressions equal 1.7 million CPMs, which is about 10 million in advertising fees. 365 days a year multiplied by 10 million equals 3.65 billion traffic. In other words, we will provide at least 3.65 billion yuan worth of traffic to the O2O industry in one year."

However, they do not plan to do ground marketing, but instead adopt the approach of cooperating with partners. In a cooperation agreement just signed with Baidu, Baidu Nuomi will help WiFi Master Key improve the hotspot coordinates of offline merchants to enrich the POI database; and WiFi Master Key will provide traffic advertisements free of charge to Nuomi's merchants, and the merchant's ordering information or discount information will pop up after connecting to WiFi.

WiFi Master Key also plans to cooperate with more O2O companies, such as recommending Didi Taxi services after meals, and exchanging resources with Ctrip for hotel and other products.

The core of future market competition is big data. WiFi connections have natural location attributes, so deep data mining is the core of the Wi-Fi Master Key business ecosystem. For example, if you want to open an anime-themed bar, if you conduct data analysis on the people who access the Internet in the backend of the bar, you may find that the people who come to the store every day have sports as a more powerful label than anime. If you change this theme bar to a sports theme, the business may be twice as good. In this way, you can participate in the construction of the entire O2O ecosystem.

Chen Danian has strict requirements for recruiting people, and he strictly screens every person who joins. The team currently has only 36 people, of which technical personnel account for more than 60%, and the rest are in product, operation and maintenance testing, etc. However, when it comes to precise recommendations based on big data, he set a standard - no upper limit, just take as many as possible.

Don't lose or top, just accumulate and release. The reason why Chen Danian chose this opportunity and suddenly became high-profile is closely related to the entry of competitors. It is also related to the improvement of the connection success rate after the product has accumulated strength for a long time.

After the promotion of WiFi Key, investment banks and exchanges came to us, hoping to get this mobile product that met the listing standards on the market as soon as possible. Chen Danian issued an open letter stating that he would not consider going public within three years.

Although he has wealth and does his own investments, he is not good at negotiating with capital - WiFi Master Key has not yet received any financing. He believes that O2O will be a huge market in the future and his products are underestimated.

After accumulating users, Chen Danian’s new challenge has just begun: how to better provide O2O enterprise services to accelerate commercialization.