Quxun Founder Chen Hua Talks About Second Entrepreneurship: Now Is The Golden Age Of Entrepreneurship

Now Entrepreneurship The best time is the luckiest day for entrepreneurs. " When I saw Chen Hua, who was one meter and seventy-two meters tall, and whose inch hair was shining, he turned to the afternoon sun shining into the window sill of the office, "I am not a manic entrepreneur, but I met good people project And opportunities, why not work hard? "

From founding Quexun to Alibaba

This is not Chen Hua's first venture. In 2006, Chen Hua and Wu Shichun jointly founded Quxun, a life information search website. The three years in QX were regarded as the most unforgettable time by Chen Hua.

Chen Hua began to do Skynet FTP when he was a junior at Peking University, and was also responsible for the system design of UUME. After graduation, he joined Microsoft Research Institute to do Microsoft MSN community search project. On January 1, 2006, less than three months after Kuxun's online launch, Chen Hua, the first entrepreneur, received a $2 million investment from Lianchuang Ceyuan; At the end of the same year, Lianchuang Ceyuan and SIG jointly invested 10 million dollars, accounting for 25% of the shares.

At first, Kuxun focused on the search of train tickets, and then gradually expanded to the search of rental, air tickets, hotels and other categories. In the early days, Kuxun had extensive cooperation with tourism vertical websites, 58 cities and other classified information. Kuxun and these websites are upstream and downstream, and bring traffic to them.

But at the beginning of 2009, Chen Hua followed Wu Shichun and left Kuxun. The departure of the two founders gave the industry more comments on this company with a single income model. Chen Hua said that the reason for leaving Quxun was only because of the financial crisis and insufficient funds.

In October 2009, Expedia, the world's largest online travel company, acquired Kuxun with 12 million dollars through its TripAdvisor, just to recover the investment cost of the original investors.

Chen Hua said that in fact, the development of Kuxun today is not much different from the original plan at that time. The most important experience and lesson learned in the past three years is "persistence".

"Today, when we look at the entire business model of Kuxun, as well as its customers and users, it is exactly the same as in 2008 and 2007. But with the development of the market, today's overall scale is up, and the income is up. We can do some year-on-year, and we can see similar effects for other start-ups in 2005 and 2006, such as 58 Tongcheng and Ganji.com."

Chen Hua said that in 2008, the whole domestic life service industry was in a difficult stage, looking for models and directions. However, in the late stage of the financial crisis in 2009, the whole life service market suddenly broke out, including Dianping, 58 cities, going to market, and Qunar. The income scale has reached 100 million yuan.

However, there are deviations in category positioning. Chen Hua believes that the demand of Kuxun for air tickets, hotels, rental and other categories has a certain periodicity. In contrast, the consumption density of food, clothing and travel in these categories is far higher than those in the fields previously provided by Kuxun.

In April 2009, Chen Hua joined Alibaba to take charge of the search business, hoping to fight in the field of daily life services.

At Alibaba, Chen Hua is in charge of a team of more than 100 people, developing a platform system that includes back-end capture, processing, and indexing of a complete set of searches, which is oriented to the whole network search and provides Alibaba with a powerful competitive tool in the future.

"However, this project is still incubated inside Alibaba, not outside. One module of Yitao.com, which is now online, was done together with our participation," Chen Hua said.

Chen Hua said that working in a big company like Alibaba is different from starting a business. It may not require you to think too much about the business model, nor do you require that your product must follow different practices in the market. The biggest requirement is to make Alibaba's search product a step up in user experience.

Chen Hua concluded that his work experience in Alibaba not only brought him the glory of a large enterprise, but also cultivated his experience in leading a team of hundreds of people.

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Chen Hua, CEO of Tao.com
Secondary entrepreneurship: targeting mobile+group purchase+?

Chen Hua said that he was not a person who started his own business for the sake of entrepreneurship. What made him start his second venture?

"Search is a technical thing, not a commercial thing. I don't want to just do something fun technically, but rather do something that can make more people feel useful and helpful," Chen Hua said.

At present, there are about 11 million iOS, 13-14 million effective Android phones, and 25 million real mobile Internet devices in China. By the end of the year, the number of mobile Internet devices may reach 50 million.

Chen Hua believes that the current opportunity of mobile Internet is like that of the domestic Internet in 1998 and 1999. It is an explosive, fast growing user, and there is no new field of giants this year. As long as you come up with a good direction at that time and do the best products, then this opportunity must be yours.

Another opportunity is group buying. First, it is a "prepaid" model; Second, the payment period is very short, and the interval between payment and consumption is not long compared with other industries.

Chen Hua said that in the past, Kuxun's real estate, recruitment, cars, etc. were not prepaid models, but after the air tickets and hotels were made, the way was smooth, because the air tickets and hotels were prepaid models. Only the prepaid mode, which brings value to other merchants on the backstage website, can reflect greater value, control the intermediate transaction process, and do more things.

If it is not prepaid and must be paid after offline consumption, first, it is difficult to control the quality; Second, it is also difficult to control whether users have successfully sold.

"The charging model for advertising and online games is that I have to cultivate a group of users before I can make money, and group buying can not only make money on the first day, but also has a very low threshold." Chen Hua said, "I have asked many small websites, that is, group buying websites made by two or three people, whether you make money or not, they said it was good, 10% or 20% of the profits, there is no problem to feed them. ”Chen Hua believes that the group buying industry can accommodate 100 companies.

But this judgment is quite different from the opinions of CEOs of group buying websites such as Lashou and Meituan. Wu Bo, CEO of Lashou, and Wang Xing (microblog), CEO of Meituan, both maintain that there are only 5-10 group buying websites at the end of this year.

Who is wrong?

Chen Hua pointed out that only when everyone has no way to survive and make money can there be a few monopolies. However, China's consumer market is large enough and the battle front is very long. It will be difficult to rely on a few takeaways. Group buying will not have this situation.

In addition, group purchase will present channelization of local portal websites. Large flow websites regard group buying as a cash channel, just like the online games and patch ads jointly operated by various websites today.

Chen Hua believes that group buying websites will present the Taobao store model. As long as each group buying website can send dozens of orders every day, it will give users an additional choice.

"You can open a large store like JD or a small store. I'm happy to earn thousands of yuan to support myself by opening a small store on Taobao. As a result, there will be several stores as large as JD, but there will also be many small specialty stores. If many people think that this can earn money to support themselves, why not open it?"

Based on the two concepts of mobile phone and group buying, Chen Hua targeted the project of his second venture at the group buying recommendation engine "Most Taobao" of the mobile Internet. Through this platform based mobile group buying product, users can not only view group buying information anytime and anywhere, but also establish new friends, and can recommend nearby group buying projects and friends to users through location services.

However, there is a problem. Most Taobao has positioned itself as a platform for group buying. However, on the PC side, there are also many group buying navigation websites. In addition, Lashou, Meituan and other group buying websites are also trying to integrate outward to develop towards the platform. This has formed a tripartite competition among the self generated platform, the platform with traffic advantage, and the platform with expanded content. So, what is the most important reason to win the platform competition?

In this regard, Chen Hua said that the most popular core is the mobile Internet, which is still an incremental market for group buying. From other life service websites, mobile users have accounted for 40% of the total users, which has not been fully exploited in the field of group buying. Chen Hua said that the most Taobao website is actually helping group buying websites find new users, rather than dividing up their existing users.

This includes two elements:

One is LBS. Mark all the group purchase content on the map, and users can see where I am, what group purchase content is one or two kilometers away, and what may be the most favorite for users. On map collection, Zotao.com cooperated with Gaode.

Second, the whole microblog system. Users can subscribe to keywords, such as movie tickets. The system can directly notify users of the group purchase of new movie tickets in Beijing in the future; Secondly, users can subscribe to the website. For example, I like Meituan's products. When Meituan launches a new product, I can quickly tell users; Third, users can listen to friends, and their group buying behavior can be notified to users through the feed.

In terms of payment, the most Taobao adopts different ways for different cooperative group buying websites. Some users can pay in advance directly on www.taobao.com, while others need to pay on the group purchase website of the cooperative relationship.

At present, domestic mobile payment is still immature, and the related payment links are not rigorous. It is reported that some mobile payment is to directly input the amount of a card number, and then the bank will call back a phone, and input the transaction on the phone; Others dial the phone first, bind the user's bank card with the mobile phone number of the payment unit, and then conduct the transaction after binding; Moreover, the user can directly enter the card number and bind it with the credit card of the payment unit to purchase goods.

In order to enable users to complete the "prepaid payment" on their own platform as much as possible, Chen Hua said that most Taos are making greater efforts in the mobile payment link.

It is revealed that Zuotao has signed cooperation agreements with twenty or thirty group buying websites.

When talking about the obstacles in negotiating with group buying websites, Chen Hua said that due to the limitations of mobile phone screens, some group buying websites will have concerns about how to solve the problems of users' registration, login, and order submission on mobile phones. Most Taos is building a green channel with more than a dozen group buying websites, so that users can send orders to group buying websites in the simplest way on their mobile phones, without the need for complex processes.

However, it is not suitable for users to verify on their mobile phones.

In February of this year, Tao.com has completed round A of multi million dollar financing. In addition to group buying+mobile, there are other concepts in the development model of Tao.com.

Chen Hua said that he is a relatively cautious and introverted person. "When thinking about many problems, he hopes to draw a picture of dozens of different roles in it."

My biggest pursuit in life is to do one thing, and then tens of millions of users can say that it is easy to use.
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