Reborn: Billionaire in College

Chapter 47 SNS Social Platform
Compared to the Hundred Regiments Campaign in 2011, there was also a SNS war of its own in 2006. In the summer of 2005, Facebook became popular in the United States, and Wang Xing also founded Xiaonei.com in China.

At the beginning of this year, a large number of campus SNS emerged in China, including "Baoyu" from Fudan University, "eDorm" from Renmin University, "Yiyou" from Sun Yat-sen University, "looface" from Beihang University, "Class Break Exercise" created by a Stanford PhD, "5Q.com" created by Chen Yizhou, and "Zhanzuo.com" created by Zhang Fan and his wife, both of whom have MBAs from Yale.

After that, Xiaonei.com quickly grew to one million users, but faced the dilemma of not being able to afford to rent servers, so it was sold to Oak Pacific in October of that year.

Just two years later, Xiaonei was renamed Renren and received a US$4.3 million investment from SoftBank's Masayoshi Son. It was successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. On the day of its listing, its market value exceeded US$70 billion, ranking fourth among Chinese Internet companies, second only to BAT.

At that time, Renren was half of China's social network, the other half was QQ, and it was called "China's Facebook".

Many years later, someone asked Wang Xing, "Is it a pity to sell Xiaonei? " Wang Xing stood there, speechless.

Of course, Renren ultimately failed to become the "Chinese version of Facebook." There are many reasons for this, including the fact that WeChat preempted the initiative in mobile social networking, social networking among acquaintances was not a rigid demand, and serious content homogeneity. In addition, due to constant trial and error, Renren entered the fields of games, group buying, video, live streaming and even Internet finance. In the end, Renren became a hodgepodge with few social attributes left.

When talking about Renren, we have to mention Kaixin, which focused on gaming and social networking. It was once very popular and even briefly surpassed Renren in terms of traffic. However, a domain name dispute seriously damaged its vitality. Coupled with the pressure from Weibo and QQ Farm, it eventually became obscured by the crowd.

So 2006 was a very interesting year. Various SNS emerged, but the northern wind had not yet blown to the south, Kaixin.com had not yet come out, and mobile Internet was still in its early stages.

"So, you want to make a social SNS website similar to Xiaonei?" The young programmer opposite frowned and thought for a long time after hearing what Chen Pingjiang said, and asked tentatively.

Chen Pingjiang nodded: "You can say that, but not entirely."

Chen Pingjiang found Focus Software, located on Zhujiang Road, on the Internet. There are only six people in the entire company, and they usually take on web development work.

Someone next to him asked him, "What is the campus network?"

The young programmer explained: "Some of my classmates in BJ have started playing with this thing, uploading photos or writing blogs."

"I know about blogs. We can do it without any problem."

“Which secondary pages do you need?”

Chen Pingjiang thought about it, took a pen and paper and started to draw according to his memory: "The horizontal categories are homepage, personal homepage, friends, messages, mall, and applications. The left navigation bar is divided into popular, friends' dynamics, related to me, attention, groups, gifts, knowledge, two-dimensional, music, food, job search, topics, and game applications. The personal homepage has logs, albums, chats, sharing, videos, music, message boards, personal columns, my image, etc."

Miao Bingwei, a programmer of 18 years old, watched Chen Pingjiang describe on paper. At first, he felt that it was true, but the more he looked, the more he felt that something was wrong. Why did the style of painting change? The second dimension and food were understandable, but what was this mall? What was this game? Why was he looking for a job again?

After thinking for a while, Miao Bingwei used euphemism to remind him: "Uh, Mr. Chen, I feel it's a bit weird, there are a lot more contents than ordinary SNS."

Chen Pingjiang nodded, "Yes, just follow this template. We will contact you on QQ for the specific details."

Yes, Chen Pingjiang planned to create an SNS social networking site, but he also added local life and information classification, which can be said to be a strange hodgepodge. To put it more vividly, it is a combination of Xiaonei.com + QQ space + e-commerce + Zhihu + Weibo + 58.com + Tianya.

Seeing Chen Pingjiang so confident, Miao Bingwei simply shut up. Party A has made a request, so let's do as Dad says.

After talking about SNS social networking sites, Chen Pingjiang raised a new requirement: "Help me build a cash register system for restaurants."

Miao Bingwei nodded. "This is easy to do. We have done similar things for other companies before. We can modify it according to your needs."

While Miao Bingwei was dealing with Chen Pingjiang verbally, he kept thinking about SNS social networking sites in his mind. He always felt that what Chen Pingjiang was doing was interesting. To be more precise, it looked like social networking, but in fact it was a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Chen Pingjiang has his reasons for doing this. Xiaonei.com is going to be acquired this month. He has the first-mover advantage and funds. He must add some differentiated content to the product, increase user stickiness, and cultivate user habits, so as not to be killed when the big wave comes.

Xiaonei.com adopts the real-name system and focuses on the college student group, but Chen Pingjiang does not intend to do so. He must serve the college student group as well as the white-collar group. While Xiaonei.com is limited to the college student group, the way to survive is to quickly capture the white-collar market.

It will first be incubated on university campuses throughout Dongjiang City, and then radiate to the white-collar groups in Dongjiang enterprises, creating high-quality and vertical content to increase user stickiness and form user habits.

Recruitment and shopping malls are naturally means of monetization. The best example is that Xiaonei.com had to sell itself because it had no money to continue renting servers. In the final analysis, a product still needs to have the ability to generate revenue and channels to monetize, otherwise it will only become a meal for capital step by step, and it may not have a good market prospect.

Chen Pingjiang had thought about taking advantage of the situation in one go, seizing Kaixin.com's fortune, and directly grabbing food and parking spaces. However, if he really did that, he would only enjoy a short-lived glory, but he would die even faster after the glory ended.

First of all, once the parking space grabbing and food grabbing games are launched, they will inevitably bring in a large number of visitors. The explosive growth in traffic requires a large number of servers, which all cost real money.

Secondly, without a moat, once QQ Farm follows suit, it will be unable to resist.

Finally, although this type of game brings traffic, it still needs to retain traffic. Social games are different from traditional games that can continuously update content versions. Their life cycle is very short. When customers are tired of fighting for parking spaces and food, if you want to retain users, you still need the website to have enough content to attract users.

This is how Kaixin.com collapsed, but there are certainly more reasons than just this one.

Therefore, Chen Pingjiang must first work hard on his internal skills, create content, and lay a solid foundation before using social games to detonate traffic. This is the right path.

Don't take too big steps, as it's easy to pull your balls. Just stay calm and develop slowly.

As for why there is too much content, just add content in the initial stage, and then subtract content after it develops. When the time comes, you can split it up and make it independent.

(End of this chapter)