What were once ten unicorns can now only produce an autopsy report

The world of unicorns is never short of stories. It is like a stage play, with romance on the stage and tears and snot off the stage.

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On the last day of the National Day holiday, the marriage between Meituan and Dianping caused a stir in the entire technology circle. When people were arguing that they could delete an APP and complaining about no subsidies in the future, did anyone remember the smoke-filled war between thousands of groups in 2014? And when it came to the AH wedding, do you still remember Huang Xiaoming's Fanke style?

Dangdang, Yixun, PPG, Vancl, LightInTheBox, Lashou, Wowotuan, Redbaby, Lefeng, Yihaodian, which one of them was not a unicorn that dominated the market in its day? Now they are no longer as glorious as they used to be. Do you still remember them? If so, what have you learned from them?

Failed to make the leap from personal hero to business leader - Dangdang.com

Dangdang.com was founded in 1999 and is one of the earliest Internet startups. At that time, BAT had not yet grown into the three giants, JD.com had not yet been launched, and Liu Qiangdong was still setting up a stall in Zhongguancun. Dangdang.com stood out with its B2C model and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010. But why did it later fall into a long-term profit dilemma?

Now it seems that Dangdang.com is like a fallen aristocrat, just like its founder Li Guoqing. At first, Li Guoqing showed his diligence, and taking Dangdang.com to the market was enough to go down in history, but he lacked the courage to become a big boss and could not make the leap from a personal hero to a business leader. After losing the capital that made him proud, Li Guoqing was still very proud. Whether it was a strategic investment or the sale of the company, he always demanded to ensure his own voice in Dangdang.com. It was this strong sense of sentimentality that aroused the disgust of investors. Despite the subsequent cooperation with No.1 Store and BBK, Dangdang.com still failed to reverse its decline in the market squeezed by wolves in front and tigers behind.

JD.com, which was once on par with Dangdang.com, has already been listed, and its market value exceeded US$50 billion in June this year; while Dangdang.com's market value has now shrunk to only US$545 million. I wonder what Li Guoqing would think when faced with this dilemma.

Dependence on Tencent, success or failure depends on Xiao He - Yixun.com

Speaking of JD.com, Yixun.com also died at the hands of JD.com. Yixun.com was founded in 2006 by Bu Guangqi, a former employee of Newegg.com. It started at the same starting line as JD.com. Its sales reached 2 billion in 2011 and tripled in 2012. At its peak, it established a "cat and dog fighting command center" to challenge Alibaba and JD.com. But how could this B2C giant collapse in just half a year?

Looking through the history of Yixun.com, it is not difficult to find that success and failure are both due to Xiao He. In Bu Guangqi's eyes, logistics has always been the best bargaining chip for Yixun.com to fight against JD.com, and Tencent's initial investment has given active cooperation, not only providing strong traffic support for Yixun.com, but also helping Yixun.com build a logistics and warehousing system with its capital investment. However, all this is like boiling a frog in warm water, and Yixun.com has gradually been controlled by Tencent. Although Yixun.com once climbed to the top on Double Eleven in 2013, its fate is no longer its own.

In March 2014, Tencent and JD.com reached a deal, and Yixun.com was merged into JD.com. However, due to the fact that its business overlapped with JD.com, and Yixun.com's huge losses affected JD.com's IPO, it was "shelved" except for a small part of the integration. A once ambitious B2C e-commerce company has come to a point where it has come to an end.

Water can carry a boat , but it can also capsize it - PPG

In 2005, Li Liang founded PPG. With the concept of light assets and reduced circulation links, coupled with carpet advertising, it quickly became a market leader, received three rounds of financing, and planned to go public on the Nasdaq in the United States. But who could have thought that PPG would die just two years later.

It now seems that PPG's fall was due to its failure to realize the truth that "water can carry a boat, but it can also overturn it." PPG's rise was due to the upstream suppliers, downstream advertisers, and VCs who believed in this business model helping PPG advance funds, which enabled PPG to advance rapidly; the reason for its fall was that when PPG got into trouble, the upstream and downstream and VCs turned against each other. The market that PPG had originally dominated suddenly broke into several arrogant competitors, and consumers who favored PPG were diverted, causing PPG to have unsaleable goods in its own hands. To make matters worse, VCs stopped paying at this time, so PPG had to sell its inventory at a low price to protect itself. This move caused an uproar in the entire market, and upstream suppliers and downstream advertisers added a knife at this special time, completely destroying PPG's life.

In 2007, PPG faced the dilemma of having its bank deposits frozen and its materials taken away by the court, which became the biggest investment joke in China's Internet in recent years.

Deviating from the small and beautiful positioning, what happened to the original intention? - Vancl

Vancl, which borrowed from the PPG model, was founded in 2007. After completing seven rounds of financing, its valuation exceeded 3 billion US dollars and it was very close to going public. Vancl was once the most popular company, so why did it disappear later?

In addition to the low brand cultural value of Vancl, which led to low user loyalty and the lack of strong capital backing, the main reason for its decline to this point is that Vancl forgot its original intention, deviated from its original small and beautiful positioning, and expanded its product line wantonly, confusing users' perception of the brand. At its craziest, Vancl had more than 30 product lines, selling not only clothing, but also home appliances, digital products, and department stores. When the number of SKUs was the largest, Vancl sold as many as 190,000 styles of goods. Mass production affected quality control, and Vancl was bound to fail.

After that, the valuation gradually shrank, and Vancl was in trouble for a long time. It took three years for Vancl to lay off tens of thousands of employees to 300 people, and to go from crazy expansion to strategic contraction. Although Chen Nian has recently been learning from Lei Jun's Xiaomi to try to create a hit product, the general trend has gone, and Vancl has been eliminated from the arena.

The cross-border B2C model is under attack from both inside and outside - LightInTheBox

LightInTheBox was founded in 2007. Its basic business model is a cross-border B2C. It received three rounds of financing within three years and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on June 6, 2013. Why was LightInTheBox, known as the "first stock of foreign trade e-commerce", later acquired?

Xu Dingxin, founder of Dingkun Cross-border E-commerce Club, believes that the company has come to where it is today due to both internal strategic mistakes and external changes. "I think there are five aspects involved. First, Alibaba's AliExpress has directly affected the company's revenue in recent years, and the growth rate has slowed down significantly. Second, changes in Google's algorithm have made it difficult for the company to obtain traffic, and independent sites mainly rely on traffic. Third, the industry is highly competitive, and the company's expenses have increased significantly. Fourth, the company's overseas warehousing and logistics construction has encountered tax issues, which has hindered its cash flow. Fifth, the product category has expanded too quickly, and there are too many SKUs."

The current situation of Lazada is extremely embarrassing, with a large number of employees leaving and numerous conflicts with suppliers. After acquiring Lazada, OKAN International was dragged down and suffered a loss of 270 million yuan in just three months.

The wrong model leads to prosperity due to impulse and failure due to confusion - Lashou.com

Lashou.com, as the earliest group-buying giant, was founded in 2009. In its heyday, it received three rounds of financing in just one year. It was labeled as the darling of capital, the local life assistant of ordinary people, and the life-saving straw of merchants. In 2011, its valuation reached 1.1 billion US dollars. In the "Thousands of Group Buying Wars", Lashou.com's development momentum has always been optimistic. Why has it ended up with endless sighs?

If you look into the root of the problem, you will find that it thrives on impulse and falls on confusion. You should know that the group buying model is not feasible because its gross profit margin is low and most of it is supported by financing. If you burn money alone, you will have a hard time if the capital chain cannot keep up one day. Therefore, it is particularly important to build an ecological system and increase traffic. However, after rapid financing, Lashou.com blindly burned money to expand its scale and grow wildly, focusing only on IPOs, but foolishly neglected the cultivation of internal strength. Its organizational structure and management mechanism could not keep up with the rapid expansion, which buried endless hidden dangers.

In 2011, Lashou.com failed in its IPO attempt and was severely damaged. It gradually fell out of the first tier of group buying websites and eventually ended up being acquired.

Those who do evil will eventually perish by themselves - Wowotuan

There was another seed player that could not be ignored in the "Thousands of Groups War" at that time - Wowotuan, whose transaction volume at its peak once jumped to the top five in the industry. So why did Wowotuan's transaction volume fall sharply after its rapid expansion?

Now it seems that those who do evil will eventually perish. Regardless of its love of lying about financing, unclear transformation concepts, and its blind pursuit of IPO, its options dispute alone has set a time bomb for itself, and the moment it explodes is the moment it reaches Nasdaq heaven. In the second half of 2011, after the A round of financing, 55tuan carried out large-scale layoffs and triggered a number of collective rights protection cases due to irregular operations. Many people have obtained options, but because they have not been listed and do not meet the conditions for exercising their options, the relevant disputes have been dormant. In early 2015, after 55tuan submitted its prospectus to Nasdaq, the parties involved in the dispute began to claim their rights against 55tuan through legal means. Although Xu Maodong led 55tuan to successfully go public four months later, it seemed beautiful, but the actual foundation was already empty.

In June this year, 55tuan announced a merger with Zhongmei Lianhe to form Zhongmei 55tuan, with Xu Maodong as co-chairman. In September of the same year, 55tuan announced the divestiture of its main group-buying business and quietly withdrew from the arena, and Xu Maodong also gradually faded out.

The market still needs education, it was born at the wrong time - Redbaby

In 2012, for millions of Chinese families and mothers with infants, the brand Redbaby was probably known to everyone. At that time, Redbaby was the most professional vertical e-commerce company in China for maternal and child care and cosmetics, with annual sales of more than 1 billion yuan and more than 7.5 million registered members. Why did it acquire and join Suning e-commerce at the end of September of the same year?

Redbaby's merger and acquisition into Suning's e-commerce was a bit of a dilemma, but in fact, it was a combination of two strong forces to actively seek a win-win situation. Redbaby was born at the wrong time because the maternal and infant market was not yet mature at the time. To win, education was required first. The construction of the maternal and infant ecosystem was not something that "Redbaby" could do alone. Instead, it was necessary to closely integrate all kinds of online and offline needs with the maternal and infant groups, such as new and old users, industry partners, brand suppliers, education and training institutions, and maternal and infant media, and launch more new service projects based on the Redbaby maternal and infant network. Therefore, Suning's merger and acquisition helped Redbaby expand its business and increase traffic, while also bringing in Suning Cloud Commerce's advanced logistics and O2O concepts.

In Buffett's words, Redbaby now just needs to be a child of time with patience and look forward to a win-win situation with Suning in the future.

Over-reliance on celebrity effect - Lefeng.com

On the surface, Lefeng.com may be another Redbaby, but the current situation shows that Lefeng.com was acquired by Vipshop. Lefeng.com was founded in 2008 by the well-known TV personality Li Jing. Relying on the star effect and Sequoia Capital behind it, its sales reached 1 billion yuan in 2011 and 1.89 billion yuan in 2012, forming a rivalry with Jumei. Why was it acquired later?

In the Internet era, the celebrity effect can indeed help Lefeng.com gather popularity and gain great reputation in a short period of time, but excessive reliance on the celebrity effect has caused Lefeng.com to deviate from the core of e-commerce. Lefeng.com has evolved from an initial pure online channel to a brand operation company. Its business chain has expanded longer and longer, but it has failed to understand what exactly it wants to do, blurred its positioning, and made the entire company's strategy waver.

Subsequently, under the impetus of Sequoia Capital, Vipshop acquired 75% of Lefeng.com's shares. Although Li Jing claimed that this was a strategic investment, in fact, she had already lost control. On the other hand, Lefeng.com has fallen behind in the competition with Jumei.com. Relevant data shows that Jumei.com's sales in 2013 were about 9 billion yuan, while Lefeng.com's sales in 2013 were about 3 billion yuan, about one-third of Jumei.com's.

Single shareholder structure, power in the hands of others - Yihaodian

Once upon a time, Yihaodian, as a vertical e-commerce company for fast-moving consumer goods, entered people's sight and won the favor of capital. Less than a year after Ping An invested in Yihaodian, Walmart invested 450 million yuan in 2011. This transaction situation seemed very suitable, but why did Yihaodian decline?

First of all, Yihaodian was competing with giants such as JD.com and Jumei. Compared with JD.com's electrical appliances, Yihaodian's fast-moving consumer goods did not have an advantage, so the primary task for Yihaodian was to steer the development direction of the e-commerce platform. However, with the withdrawal of Ping An and the gradual investment of Walmart, the diversification of Yihaodian's shareholder structure was eliminated. Later, the founder of Yihaodian lost control, which meant that the decision-making power of the development direction was fully handed over to Walmart. As an international retail giant, Walmart, despite holding the world's largest and most efficient supply chain, was only concerned about how to turn Yihaodian into an "online Walmart" and use it to further open up the Chinese market.

At this point, No.1 Store died.

Understand history and foresee the future

The unicorns that can join the "billion-dollar startup club" are definitely the elite among the elites. Of course, not all unicorns will succeed. Under the tall buildings, there are corpses. After all, survival of the fittest. While we feel regretful, we must also learn to understand history in order to foresee the future.

Yiou.com officially settled in Shenzhen on August 24. Entrepreneurs in South China are welcome to contact Yiou.com. The contact person is the author of this article: Wu Miaoyun, a columnist of Yiou.com, WeChat ID: imababude, Weibo: -babude. Please be sure to note "real name-company-title" when adding; please indicate the author's name and "source: Yiou.com" when reprinting; the content of the article is the author's personal opinion and does not represent Yiou.com's agreement or support for the opinion.