Maimai’s road to 25 million users: Since social networking is not good enough, let’s make a real-name content community

Every smartphone user must be familiar with these scenarios:

Your WeChat friends are scattered among your relatives, friends, colleagues and strangers. For them, you have opened countless dialog boxes. Often, you have just finished talking about love with your girlfriend, and in the blink of an eye you have to accept work documents from your boss in another dialog box. Take a look at your circle of friends that is filled with life and work updates. Some people are posting intimate photos of themselves and their relatives and friends, some are forwarding various articles, and of course, there are inevitably a few micro-businesses clamoring occasionally.

Can people be freed from the clutter of WeChat?

This was the concept promoted by the workplace social application Maimai when it was first launched in 2013. "Work version of WeChat" became Maimai's slogan. At that time, Maimai's CEO Lin Fan believed that he could allow people in the workplace to find a place to live outside of WeChat.

2.

However, this workplace social networking site, which raised $20 million in Series B funding in August 2014 with only 800,000 users, had become different from his original plan by 2017.

Today's Maimai is not like WeChat, but more like open communities like Zhihu and Xueqiu.

Let’s first summarize the three core user demands that Maimai is currently focusing on:

• Expand your horizons

• Build connections

• Self-expression

To put it more bluntly, professionals can go to Maimai to create content (updates, articles, services), browse content (other people's real-name or anonymous updates, job broadcasts, and workplace information recommended by Maimai), and find people.

This means that Maimai has become a community that focuses on content. If finding and knowing people is regarded as obtaining people's information, then Maimai is almost entirely occupied by the content framework.

As for Maimai’s social function, it now seems to be more of a tool module for adding friends.

3.

Ultimately, it is too difficult to do social networking under the shadow of Tencent.

Connecting users through content has become an option for survival. Maimai has evolved into a content community and continues to maintain its semi-open nature.

On Maimai, once you have chosen your career field, the content you see here and the people you can contact are almost all related to this profession, including the real-name and anonymous dynamics of other people in this profession, recommendations from people in this profession, and information recommendations for this profession...

Cooks have their own world, and programmers have their own world. Although Maimai's organizational method of focusing on vertical fields has caused lone stars in each industry to fall, it has also strengthened the internal cohesion of people in the workplace due to industry commonality in this semi-open state, allowing more exchanges within the industry to not be overwhelmed by the flood of information.

Of course, if Maimai's organizational method is limited to this, then it does not have much in common with the ancient professional forums and Tieba models. The biggest advantage of Maimai, and the most obvious aspect of its semi-open nature, is its human organizational method.

Maimai relies on mobile phone numbers to determine the degree of familiarity between two friends. Those who have each other's mobile phone numbers are familiar friends, one-way address book friends are acquaintances, and those who are only added as friends on Maimai are newly acquainted friends. As for those friends of friends, they will be regarded as first-degree, second-degree, and third-degree connections on Maimai.

For example, if you have 100 familiar friends, 200 acquaintances, and 300 new friends on Maimai, then the number of potential connections you can tap into will be more than 20,000.

If you want to explore more connections, the only way is to add more people. The more people you add, the more open Maimai will be to you. Maimai is not like ordinary social software that deliberately focuses on privacy, nor is it a purely public platform like Weibo and Zhihu. It is more in the middle ground and is a semi-open platform open for exploration.

This type of incentive, in turn, promotes the production of content. Only by filling in more specific professional information or even adding V certification and publishing personal updates that are more in line with their own identities can users more easily verify their identities and realize their desire to expand their network. Content production is multi-frequency and time-consuming. In this process, content producers will undoubtedly become qualified content consumers.

The semi-open setting of occupational stratification and organizational structure makes it more costly for Maimai to acquire users, but once the users' enthusiasm is aroused, the frequency of their production and consumption of content will be very high.

4.

Let’s review Maimai’s major achievements in the past two years.

First, it has accumulated more users and expanded to more professional circles. By the beginning of 2017, Maimai had accumulated 25 million users, covering all professional categories.

The second is to cooperate with other platforms to allow the real-name information and authentication on Maimai to serve as an endorsement for users on other platforms, or to access credit information such as Ant Financial's Sesame Credit to endorse Maimai users.

These two achievements, the former is a reflection of the scale goal that all platforms are pursuing, and the latter is the unique advantage of Maimai - the step-by-step appreciation of the real-name network.

The biggest pain for institutions such as banks, securities firms , and Alipay has always been that although they hold the core information of users, they can never go beyond the line, and all user information is private.

How can we encourage users to voluntarily contribute their personal information and make this information generate connective value?

The answer is only social network, so we can see the struggle of Alipay - even though social networking is thankless, Alipay still has to do it; if social networking is not done well, it will settle for the next best thing and start an Alipay circle that is similar to a community.

Unlike Alipay, Maimai has always openly stated in its registration agreement that it would capture and upload users' contact information; in the early days, when Maimai was connected to the Weibo interface, it captured the relationship chain of Maimai users on Weibo - although this case recently went to court and ended with Maimai losing the case and paying 2 million in compensation.

Just like Toutiao made its fortune by scraping high-quality content from major news platforms at low prices or even for free in its early days , Maimai, which also has moral flaws, has gradually become popular due to the time lag between user indulgence and the maturity of emerging technologies and regulations. As it expands in scale, Maimai has also triggered a certain black hole effect among some groups - if you want to make connections on Maimai, hand over your address book list first.

When this real-name network cooperates with credit reporting agencies and is gradually associated with user consumption behavior and linked to an individual's reputation on the Internet, Maimai will not only have considerable external traffic, but will also increase the value of its user information.

5.

Value-added brings value, and Maimai currently claims to have achieved break-even.

36Kr learned that in Maimai's revenue structure, 80% comes from advertising, 20% comes from membership, and recruitment is considered a type of advertising, accounting for only 10% of advertising revenue.

The advantage of Maimai's advertising is that it can be directly delivered to specific professional fields, which is more accurate. The disadvantage is that the volume is still too small. Maimai's membership income once again benefits from its semi-open feature - users place orders to purchase memberships in order to efficiently gain more connections.

This is different from the revenue structure of LinkedIn, a giant in workplace social networking. LinkedIn, which has been acquired by Microsoft, has grown from US$70 million in revenue to US$3 billion in annual revenue in the past seven years. Its core revenue comes from corporate customers, and in terms of business, the recruitment business - talent solution revenue accounts for the majority, while advertising and membership revenue each account for about 20%.

Maimai is more TO C.

This is obviously Maimai's adaptation to local conditions. If Maimai did not go to C and did not spend effort to create a semi-open workplace content community, its fate would be the same as the large number of LinkedIn China copies that emerged in China before.

No one is willing to contribute their information on a platform with more weak connections. This is the general background why workplace social networking has never been successful in China.

A common reason is that the Chinese workplace culture has not yet been fully established, and cultural traditions are more accustomed to drinking culture and face-to-face communication.

Maimai's approach is to respect the reality of the Chinese workplace. It relies on content to consolidate users on the platform, pursues user stickiness, and combines it with the tradition of China's Internet - advertising to realize monetization, rather than directly engaging in online recruitment as soon as it has a few users.

Even Maimai’s exploration of content monetization is looking for proven successful models.

For example, after the paid voice Q&A that was popular last year came out, Maimai followed suit and launched industry Q&A.

For example, in the live broadcast war, Maimai launched Zhibo, a form of presentation that can be regarded as Maimai’s advertising business.

For example, by imitating the model of machine-based information distribution advocated by Toutiao, it launched an internal test of industry-customized headlines based on machine algorithms.

According to Maimai CEO Lin Fan, knowledge payment is expected to be popular in 2017, and Maimai is already in contact with external channels . The initial partner is most likely to be Luoji Siwei.

6.

In the past two days, Zhihu, which has been criticized for having no commercial prospects, received US$100 million in Series D financing, becoming a new member of the unicorn company; and LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for US$26.2 billion in all-cash premium when its stock price fell last year.

Neither of these two companies is a competitor of Maimai, but to some extent, Maimai has the potential to explore and develop Zhihu's large-scale network and LinkedIn's workplace social big data advantages.

The theory we have emphasized countless times is that the competition in the second half of the Internet is essentially a competition for user time. As opportunities for emerging platforms become scarce, social platforms that have come from behind in the wave of mobile dividends have grabbed enough user time. No matter what they do in the future, they will be regarded as scarce resources by capital.

Maimai undoubtedly has the potential to become a scarce resource. It has users' real-name professional information, a certain amount of scale advantages, and sticky content, which is enough for users to spend time here.

Once workplace social networking becomes more popular with the development of workplace culture, Maimai will have great potential to make money by developing recruitment services similar to LinkedIn and a complete set of data mining and analysis businesses.

In the past year, the number of users in the financial, real estate, and media fields on Maimai has reached a scale comparable to Maimai's traditional advantage - Internet practitioners. In 2017, according to CEO Lin Fan's plan, Maimai will increase its marketing efforts to allow users from more industries to use Maimai.

The last time Maimai carried out large-scale brand promotion was in early 2015 - at that time, Maimai had just received a round of financing. According to this assumption, Maimai's new round of financing is estimated to come in 2017.

It seems that the only problem holding Maimai back is whether it can get users to really be active on the platform.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

This article was compiled and published by @闫浩由 (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!