It took seven years for the business to make a profit, just because of the deep love for football

Loving football is an essential gene for every member of the OuOu football team.

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"When the Ouou community was first established, the first batch of users were friends who played football together. Everyone who plays football on the field knows about the Ouou community. Now, our team organizes two football games every week," said Luo Shu, head of Ouou football operations. "The love of football is the cohesive force of the group and the driving force for doing this."

It does require motivation. Ouou Football, founded in 2009, tasted the sweetness of interest-based social networking in 2010, but it did not start to make a profit until 2014. This is simply impossible for entrepreneurs who are eager to make money as soon as they attract a group of users.

In 2009, in order to provide a communication platform for friends who play football together, Chen Jun, the founder of Ouou Football, and two friends established the Ouou Community. In the first year of operation, with almost no promotion, the Ouou Community developed 10,000 users.

"We are all football fans, and everyone shares all kinds of useful information on the platform. The good content continues to attract new fans to join," Luo Shu said. "At that time, we found that in addition to being interested in the events and football itself, fans also pay great attention to football equipment. So, we focused on football equipment and provided professional evaluations of football equipment on the platform."

The 2010 World Cup in South Africa was a growth opportunity for Ouou Football. In just half a year, the number of users surged to 40,000. At that time, Ouou Football launched a community group purchase, selling hundreds of pairs of adidas football shoes that cost more than 600 yuan in a short period of time, which was a very amazing performance in the e-commerce market at the time.

However, Chen Jun and Luo Shu were not in a hurry to develop e-commerce. Instead, they continued to focus on content. In the following three years, they established a professional text and streaming media editing team to do official reviews, while discovering and encouraging KOL users on the platform to do crowd testing.

Luo Shu believes that encouraging users to review products can lead to more interactions between users and products, and between users themselves, and the resulting high-quality content can help users better retain their memories.

Now, Ouou Football has developed into a social closed loop of community + professional evaluation (official evaluation and crowd testing) + product information + Ouou shopping. The platform brings together 600,000 football fans, with 500,000 PVs per day, and is connected to about 300 e-commerce companies, physical stores, and brands.

Only those who can endure loneliness can maintain prosperity. Luo Shu said that the beginning of this business was based on interest. When the company was established, it did not consider profit because it was rare to have a group of like-minded friends to work together. Mi Meng said that startups that talk about feelings are unreliable, but if they don’t talk about feelings and have no passion, they are definitely not good companies.

The following is a transcript of an interview with Luo Shu, the head of Ouou Football Operations

(Due to limited space, only the issues that entrepreneurs are concerned about are summarized, including how to continuously create good content, how to commercialize without affecting user experience, how to deal with the problem of counterfeit goods in e-commerce, etc.)

Q: The World Cup is a hot event after all. After the heat has passed, how do you maintain user activity and growth?

Luo Shu: Yes, this was a test for us at the time. There was a cooling-off period after the World Cup and there was not much change in users.

However, we found that users were very interested in the user experience summary of previous group purchases, and the merchants also gave us feedback. Even for a long time afterwards, many users contacted them to make purchases based on the product experience and summary.

We discovered the value of the football equipment review market. Producing more and better quality content so that users can have a more comprehensive understanding of products and purchase guidelines is our focus after the World Cup.

Q: So you started to build an editorial team and do professional reviews?

Luo Shu: Yes, because in the process of summarizing the product, we not only discovered the value, but also the problems. Buying users are not necessarily deep users of the product. The core of UGC is to dig out the evaluation of deep users and provide a more comprehensive, detailed and professional experience process for the product.

Therefore, we are developing relay reviews based on community users and exploring KOL reviews from deep users, while also building our own editorial team to create more professional review content.

Q: When did Ouougou Mall start to be connected? Did you start trying it after the World Cup?

Luo Shu: The establishment of the mall was actually not that fast. We focused our energy on content, and left pure market e-commerce in a wild growth mode.

I want to explain here that we don’t sell products ourselves. It is because of our influence in the field of football equipment that merchants actively find us to cooperate in promoting their products. Up to now, there are about 300 e-commerce companies, physical stores, and brand owners cooperating with us.

Q: The user group has been gathered based on interests and high-quality content, but will commercialization of this user group affect user emotions? How do you consider this?

Luo Shu: If we simply build an e-commerce platform, it will definitely have an impact on the content platform, so we thought about how to connect users and products so that users will not resist and will be more likely to accept it.

*** is to ensure through mechanism that merchants will not sell counterfeit goods, at least making it easier for users to buy reliable products, and naturally reducing their resistance.

Second, our commercial activities are often combined with community activities, which allow community users and merchant sales to resonate with each other.

Third, we are now developing the e-commerce platform Ouougou, which will gradually separate from the community and become a relatively independent platform, reducing disturbance to community users, but enabling users to easily find our certified merchants and products when they need them.

Community users need to authenticate merchants, note that they must be authenticated, haha. Of course, merchants need users more. If they can be reasonably designed and laid out, a healthy interaction will surely be formed.

Q: Ouou Football sells products by contacting third-party sellers, so how do you avoid the problem of counterfeits?

Luo Shu: Fake goods are a problem in the e-commerce industry. If we run a mall and let community users buy fake goods, the impact will be completely different from buying fake goods on other e-commerce platforms. Therefore, our platform has introduced a mechanism for merchant certification, netizen supervision, and third-party mediation and punishment for product doubts.

The first thing we do is merchant certification. We cooperate with merchants by requiring them to settle in for free, pay a good faith deposit, and accept supervision from netizens and our official department.

In fact, many people feel that this is a bit similar to ordinary e-commerce platforms, but why don’t ordinary e-commerce platforms solve this problem?

*** The product complaint of ordinary e-commerce platforms is 1 to 1 and closed, while ours is open, N to 1. If a merchant sells counterfeit products, it will be easily exposed in the community, which will make him have no place to stand.

Second, the customer service staff of ordinary e-commerce platforms do not have professional evaluation and identification capabilities, but we have a professional team and a large number of in-depth users.

Third, if counterfeit goods are sold, we will directly confiscate the merchant’s integrity deposit and disqualify the certified merchant.

In addition, we do not sell any products ourselves, we are just a pure third-party platform, so the user experience on our platform will be much higher than that of ordinary e-commerce platforms.

Q: When did OuOu Football start developing an APP? Is it easy for PC users to transfer to the APP?

Luo Shu: We launched the latest version of the APP last year. How should I put it? There are both difficulties and opportunities. After all, we are now in the mobile wave, and the general direction is definitely mobile. The biggest difference between APP and PC is fragmentation, mobility, and socialization. Socialization is actually more conducive to our product direction, and mobility will open up our incremental market. But fragmentation is a challenge for us.

On the one hand, the benefit of fragmentation is that users will use products more frequently, but on the other hand, it will also bring challenges to the production of high-quality content. For example, the production of content for the crowd testing part of product evaluation is currently difficult to achieve through mobile terminals. However, in the future, there may be a model that combines video with Miaopai and voice, because this direction is still in the process of continuous development, and we are also constantly exploring.

Q: A question for you. The Ouou football project has been running for many years, but it only started to generate revenue last year. During this period, what do you think is the most difficult thing?

Luo Shu: Positive and negative revenue is not a difficult thing for us. The most difficult thing is how the entire team can recruit more talents, talents who understand football and the Internet. Especially in the development area, it was once a problem for us. When we first started to transform into APP, because the company's technical strength and personnel structure could not support the short-term native development of APP, we initially sought outsourcing, but the first version of the APP was not only very expensive, but also took a full three months. In this process, we deeply realized that the development efficiency was low and maintenance was difficult. Later, after contacting and using APICloud, development became very simple, and the official updates were very fast. Many functions can meet our daily needs. In this process, we built our own development team and received a lot of help from APICloud. We set up a help group to solve our problems in a targeted manner. More importantly, these are all free, which saves a lot of technical development costs for our entrepreneurial companies.