Mobile Internet: One man's success depends on the sacrifice of thousands of people

[[141235]]

Many people call 2010 the first year of China's mobile Internet. With the issuance of 3G licenses, mobile data traffic soared, allowing telecom operators to be the first to smell the trend. Wang Jianzhou, then chairman of China Mobile, said that year that China Mobile's Internet traffic growth rate exceeded 150% in many cities, which was an unprecedented sign.

On the other hand, due to the rapid expansion of the Android camp, domestic terminal manufacturers began to manufacture smartphones priced at thousands of yuan to suit China's economic level. In order to educate the market, the three major telecom operators also successively made the popularization of smart terminals an important strategy this year and provided extremely large-scale subsidies.

Even in the global market, 2010 was a far-reaching turning point. Cisco produced a research report that surprised everyone, predicting that starting from 2010, the annual compound growth rate of global data traffic will reach 92% within five years, and by 2015, there will be more than 7.1 billion mobile-ready devices and M2M connections in the world. However, developments are always beyond expectations. As early as 2014, the scale of mobile-ready devices in the world has exceeded the total population, reaching 7.4 billion, and the Internet of Everything has become the forefront goal of the technology industry.

Over the past five years, the argument that "when the wind blows, even pigs can fly" has been prevalent. Although there are also constant voices saying that if the wind passes and there are no wings, one will fall down, but no one is willing to admit in advance that they will be the one who will eventually fall.

As the saying goes, "underneath the tall buildings, there are corpses." The spotlight favors those emerging leaders who are capable of becoming the template for success. However, in this wave of mass entrepreneurship and innovation, those unfinished businesses that are unwilling to give up may be worth remembering and reviewing.

"Only those who never climb can ever avoid falling," an American poet once said.
Surround the Nervous Cat: Greedy for Quick Success

On July 22, 2014, Qin Chuan, a front-end engineer at a maternal and child website in Nanjing, mobilized his team to share the game link of "Surround the Nervous Cat" to their respective WeChat Moments, which immediately triggered a neurological effect that infected the entire population.

With over 100 million PVs in three days, Qinchuan not only gained fame, but also made the Html5 technology, which had a slow standardization process, become a communication medium suitable for mobile social networks, and popularized the concept of mobile web games.

However, even if games using HTML5 as a container are popular, it is difficult to convert traffic into users. This is a cold-eyed observation in the hustle and bustle. In other words, unless there is a strong product capability that hits the bull's eye repeatedly, any success will not help the next attempt. Qin Chuan later formed a team on his own, hoping to support the breakthrough of HTML5 web games, but no matter where he went, the industry repeatedly paid attention to him, trying to find tips and shortcuts on how to trigger nerves.

Similar to H5 games, there are more cases of greed and quick success in the mobile game industry. After only two years of development since the boom in 2013, there are many products on the market that claim to have a turnover of over 100 million. However, on the other side of the boom, the mobile game industry is also facing a major reshuffle. An important feature is the emergence of a large number of small and medium-sized mobile game agents. There are many small team developers in the mobile game market. Several mobile games are released every day, but they often have no advantages in channels, brands, etc., and it is even difficult for them to access large platforms.

The gameplay and image of "Surround the Nervous Cat" were stolen from Japanese game and animation designers. Even though Tencent was once interested in cooperating with it to develop mobile games, the IP issue was a minefield. Qin Chuan later developed an HTML5 web game called "Tomb Raider Heroes", which whizzed past the popular IP "Grave Robbers' Chronicles", with extremely high commercial risks. Like the Nervous Cat, mobile game works also stepped on copyright stains and were difficult to clean up.

In the mobile game industry, IP is an inevitable topic in attracting traffic and marketing, whether it is at various conferences or in exchanges between industry insiders, but IP is not omnipotent. When it is over-abused, the final result is that the gameplay and types of mobile games on the market are seriously homogenized. Some IPs in the game industry have become a resource that "strategists" must fight for. In addition, there are frequent lawsuits such as Changyou suing "Da Zhangmen" and Ding Lei suing "Pocket Westward Journey" under his real name. While these incidents are being reported, they are directly or indirectly hyping IP. Whether it is gameplay copying or hyping IP, this series of behaviors for quick success have more or less caused countless casualties in the mobile game industry.
No secret: Arrogance, laissez-faire

If the skin is gone, where will the hair be attached? When the news that Secret, an anonymous social application in the United States that had received more than 40 million US dollars in investment, was closed down due to the curse of "C round death" reached China, all the startups that copied the similar anonymous social model secretly cursed.

In fact, it is not objective to assert that anonymous social networking has reached a dead end when Whisper and YikYak are still surviving. However, anonymity should be a specific scenario of social networking, not a user's exclusive need. Secret's popularity comes from its negative revelations about the technology industry. Companies including Evernote and YCombinator are victims of related false rumors, which makes Secret gradually notorious. Even in a free society, people do not dislike anonymous networks, but hate the viciousness of hiding behind anonymity and not daring to take responsibility.

Wumi strictly followed the growth path of Secret in the early days, and also became famous for the complaints of internal employees of famous companies in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. Soon it became the jewel in the crown of various public relations, using it to disclose some unprovable dark secrets of competitors or various love affairs of entrepreneurs, which is also a regular lesson that will definitely jump into your eyes when you open Wumi every day. Someone once joked that if you refresh Wumi one day and don’t see the quarrel between Xiaomi and LeTV, you will wonder if your phone is disconnected from the Internet.

The lack of self-purification ability is the Achilles' heel of anonymous social networking. If the social topics are rarely related, it is not a big problem. For example, Whisper and YikYak are mainly aimed at the student market and are popular for topics such as "emotional night talk". They mainly inspire users to speak out their inner secrets that they are usually too embarrassed to talk about, so they are still popular.

Following the emergence of WuMi, there were more than 20 anonymous social applications flooding the market at its peak. Most of them have now disappeared, leaving only traces of their survival in the press releases included in the search engines.
Streetside: Laziness leads to death from comfort

The sad closure of the street always reminds me of a chicken soup story, saying that a man was trapped on the roof by the flood, constantly praying for God's rescue, and refused the help of lifeboats and helicopters, and finally drowned. He questioned God in heaven, saying that I am so pious, why don't you lend a hand? God helplessly replied, I sent you two chances, a boat and a plane, but you didn't seize them.

Founded in 2010, Jiepang is one of the few mobile products that spans the transition between feature phones and smartphones. As a loyal apprentice of the American check-in application Foursquare, Jiepang was the first in China to promote the online and offline linkage of life recording gameplay, and badge collecting also became a subculture among young netizens.

Unfortunately, both the social networking and O2O opportunities were missed by Jiepang, which followed closely behind Foursquare.

In 2012, Jiepang had 3 million users and over 50 million sign-ins, which is not bad in the vertical industry. According to CEO Liu David, Jiepang has never had to worry about money. In 2012, the annual revenue exceeded RMB 10 million, and the compound growth rate of quarterly revenue was no less than 20%. Jiepang has no financial worries just by cooperating with offline merchants.

Facts have proven that being too comfortable can do more harm than good.

David Liu once told the media about his ideal positioning for Jiepang: the mobile version of Douban. Compared with Jiepang’s growth trajectory, this reference target is indeed a bit unbelievable. Yang Yuancheng, another co-founder of Jiepang, left to join Jumei Youpin because he failed to convince the company to transform into a “merchant review”.

After the O2O era began, offline merchants quickly transferred their tuition fees to Internet companies such as Meituan that were more direct in delivering profits. Street merchants completely lost their ability to generate revenue and finally stopped in a trap.
Coming and going: Jealousy, giving up the soul

In Ali's decision to depose the eldest son and enthronize the youngest as the heir, Lai Wang was a key chess piece.

When Lu Zhaoxi took over the CEO position from Jack Ma, he regarded LaiWang as an elite force to rebuild the Alibaba empire and invade Tencent's hinterland. In the early days of its launch, LaiWang had a very high product weight within Alibaba. In addition to Lu Zhaoxi's personal leadership, Jack Ma was also very interested in it. He publicly stated, "Don't use WeChat anymore, come to LaiWang to find me," which also showed his utmost support.

Frankly speaking, the teams that come and go actually demonstrate a work intensity and career enthusiasm comparable to that of a startup. At Alibaba's Xixi Campus in Hangzhou, it is not uncommon to see the lights on all night long, and many employees are excited that they are participating in a great plan to defeat WeChat.

However, success or failure in the business world often has nothing to do with determination.

From the beginning, Laiwang was a product designed to attack WeChat, and its success or failure depended on whether it could force WeChat to shrink its front line and withdraw from the e-commerce and financial markets that Alibaba was determined to win. This utilitarian mentality led to Laiwang's lack of clear strategic thinking, while WeChat's victory in the "red envelope war" at the end of the year dealt a heavy blow to Alibaba, and rumors of a quarrel between Lu Zhaoxi and Jack Ma began to appear in the newspapers from then on.

Some scathing comments said that Lu Zhaoxi built an empty back garden for the richest man. Perhaps Ding Lei's initial evaluation was quite reliable: "WeChat 5 points, Yixin 0 points, LaiWang negative points".
Qvod: Lust, there is no shortage of excuses

According to the monitoring data of Tencent Cloud Analysis based on 800 million mobile terminals, as of the first quarter of 2014, in addition to basic mainstream applications such as QQ and WeChat, Qvod is the most installed app by male users.

For a player tool that started out on PC and is still able to adapt to the mobile changes, this is a very impressive report card. However, in the second quarter, the huge fines and criminal penalties brought by the Internet Cleaning Campaign directly cut off the survival of Qvod. Male users who benefited from Qvod's solution to their basic needs could only watch the programmer entrepreneur who had hidden his merits and fame being arrested in a miserable state.

A year later, these sympathies and indignations were almost completely poured into Wang Xin's wife's Weibo. More than 15,000 Weibo users rewarded her for a Weibo post expressing their longing for her husband. She said that Wang Xin once spent money to buy Google Glass to study it, and then gave it away after he was done. "I think it's a waste and I don't quite understand it." But now that she feels the support on Weibo, she can actually "understand him."

Even in Marx's view, the code should be the "Bible of people's freedom". Today, when human nature has not yet been liberated, Qvod is actually replacing the ignorance of the times and atonement. In the future, when we look back at the feeling of "Qvod involving pornography", perhaps it will be like this moment when we look through history and find that there was a male movie star of the same generation as Liu Xiaoqing, Chi Zhiqiang, who was sentenced to prison for letting his female companion sit on his lap during the crackdown. In prison, he wrote lyrics to reflect on himself: "Holding a steamed bun in my hand/Tears can't stop flowing down/The crime I committed is so shameful/How can I raise my head".
God of Cookery Yaoyao: Anger, self-destruction of the Great Wall

Half a year after its launch, with Sequoia Capital as the lead investor, 17 employees and 6 million users, the start-up project of former Kuxun founder Wu Shichun, the personalized restaurant recommendation app Shishenyao, has had a perfect start.

Wu Shichun claimed that he was stimulated by his partner Chen Hua at Kuxun - the latter founded Changba and received investment very quickly - and God of Food Shake is the continuation of Wu Shichun's obsession with life search services. He hopes to leverage the user behavior habit of shaking the phone to obtain content that has been cultivated on WeChat, seamlessly access the O2O market, and become a mobile portal for selecting restaurants.

What he had not expected was that the God of Cookery Shake became famous in the industry not because of the brilliance of the product itself, but because of the controversy over plagiarism between it and Dianping.com. During the period when God of Cookery Shake was removed from the AppStore, Wu Shichun complained to the media that this was a "frame-up" type of vicious competition, and both God of Cookery Shake and Dianping.com began to report on each other and argue with each other.

When he was depressed, Wu Shichun would seek advice from friends. In addition to Chen Hua from Changba, Xu Yirong from Meilishuo, Zhuang Chenchao from Qunar, and Lei Ming from Kuwo were all close friends in this circle. They guided Wu Shichun on how to fight back, how to contact Apple, and how to speak to the media.

"Overtake Dianping in three years" is the slogan of Shishen Yaoyao, but VCs poured cold water on it. On an entrepreneurial program on Tencent where it was a guest, Matrix Partners partner Wan Haoji believed that Shishen Yaoyao did not have the strength to challenge the leading brands in the industry. Mu Yan, founder of Baihe.com and also an entrepreneur, also commented that this ideal that was just to defeat the big guys lacked practical feasibility.

Less than three years later, in the summer of 2014, the development of "Shi Shen Shake" was stopped and the entire team was sold to Meilishuo. Judging from the very different positioning of the two companies, this should be a talent acquisition case, and the "Shi Shen Shake" product has actually been abandoned.
Vancl: Overeating, no way to continue

The annual reflection and return has become an indelible label. Even with Lei Jun's repeated support, this former e-commerce star is still like a bucket of warm water, and the declaration of vowing to become China's MUJI is becoming increasingly weak.

"Eastern Entrepreneur" once reported on Chen Nian's transformation before he started Vancl. Since Joyo.com was sold to Amazon, Chen Nian's role suddenly changed from boss to employee. The budget he wrote was rejected, and the person sent by Amazon headquarters to handle the business was a black youth. All this made Chen Nian collapse. Xu Zhiyuan said that Chen Nian often said "Down with American imperialism" and "All illusions about Western democracy are shattered" at that time.

Vancl is an Internet brand based on fast fashion. Whether it is overtaking PPG or creating its own "Vancl style", Chen Nian has fully enjoyed the pleasure and victory of being the master. However, the nightmare brought about by the rapid expansion of product categories has made Chen Nian "pay off the debt" to this day, and his Vancl is inseparable from low prices and low quality.

At its peak, Vancl had more than 10,000 employees, more than Xiaomi has today.

E-commerce platforms such as Tmall have "internetized" a large number of traditional clothing brands, solving the problem of flexible inventory digestion through distribution and promotion. Although Vancl has begun to fully "Xiaomi-ize" with the help of Lei Jun, the results have not been clear. What Chen Nian has learned the fastest is Xiaomi's method of evaluating its peers. In introducing a new "running sportswear" launched by Vancl, Chen Nian said that Nike and Puma are "really too low."

According to statistics from Baidu Index, the keyword popularity of Vancl has been declining and is now less than 1/10 of its peak.
Great environment, but lack of craftsmanship

Weizhu Nervous Cat, well aware of the essence of "take-it-as-it-is", died due to the lack of core product quality; Wumi, arbitrarily enjoying the eye-catching economy, cannot make up for the shortcomings of its products; Jiepang, floating on the slow river of time, refuses to make up for the shortcomings of its products; Laiwang, everything revolves around WeChat, and the product has never had an original intention; Kuaibo, the alarm bells have actually sounded many times, but it is difficult to give up the product's cross-border areas; Shishen Yaoyao, its bright future has been ruined, and its products are drowned in saliva; Vancl, its strategy changes like a revolving lantern, and the edges and corners of its products have been worn away.

The above seven cases are just a microcosm of the industry. According to the data collected by various app stores, the total number of Chinese mobile applications has reached 4 million, and the average lifespan is only ten months. At the same time, the reason why unicorns are precious is precisely because of their scarcity and the huge behemoths that have collapsed and piled up behind them.

What’s interesting is that the more the term “craftsmanship” is mentioned, the more it sounds like a templated propaganda slogan. Entrepreneurs’ ability to raise money is getting better day by day, but there are still too few actions that are truly willing to pursue the ultimate product.

Dean Kamen, a legendary American inventor who invented the Segway, believes that the essence of a craftsman is to "collect and modify available technology to solve problems or create solutions to problems, thereby creating wealth, which is not only a part of this country, but also the source of its endless vitality." In other words, entrepreneurs gain huge wealth from a certain product because the product meets the needs and generates commercial profits, rather than the other way around, throwing a product in like a stone to see if it can hit a treasure chest in order to cater to the market trend.

Capital pursues profit and is always short-sighted. The changing times are bound to be noisy. The media is at fault and it is difficult to escape from impetuousness.

There was a question on Zhihu, the questioner was an engineer of an Internet giant, he introduced his and his colleagues' senior background and areas of expertise, and asked for opinions on "how to formulate a startup project". A high voted answer was that he had seen many ideas that were all ready except for the programmers, and this was the first time he saw a programmer team up and all that was missing was a startup project.

This is not a rational, respectable phenomenon.

Looking to the future, after the vigorous shuffling, the chances of picking good cards are even lower. Most entrepreneurs believe that "BAT" is blocking the upstream entrances of various vertical industries through capital layout. Compared with the rich ecology two years ago, the future path and space will only become narrower and narrower.

And we may greet the inevitable wave of death at twice the speed of the PC era.