Reborn: Billionaire in College

Fortunately, the clever Chen Pingjiang did not dare to stay in the hospital for long and was hurriedly discharged early the next morning. Otherwise, he would probably have died a very ugly death.

After being discharged from the hospital, Chen Pingjiang went back to take a look at Yan Yan, and then asked his mother-in-law to take Yan Yan back home, under the pretext of preventing her from getting infected.

He stayed in the Zhongshan villa for a few days to recuperate, and after taking time to visit his son and daughter, he returned to work.

"Mr. Chen, this is the beta version of TikTok, take a look!"

As soon as he arrived at the company, Zhang Yiming came over excitedly with a mobile phone in hand.

Xu Rui didn't stop him.

In his opinion, Zhang Yiming is currently a popular figure among Mr. Chen, and Mr. Chen is particularly concerned about the Douyin project.

Although Chen Pingjiang's fever had subsided, his cold had not yet fully recovered. He asked in a thick nasal voice, "So fast?"

Normally, the development of an APP takes at least three to four months. However, it was only a month and a half after the Chinese New Year, and Zhang Yiming actually produced a semi-finished product. It has to be said that he is very motivated.

Zhang Yiming smiled and nodded: "It's just a semi-finished product. What's important about Douyin itself is the content. The framework is just a small KISS."

Chen Pingjiang took the Orange phone and immediately smiled knowingly when he saw the TikTok icon.

The white musical notes on a black background, the same as in later generations, represent ByteDance.

The current Douyin APP is still relatively simple, and its functions are far less rich than those in later generations.

After opening the APP, what comes into view are two category boxes above and below.

Below is Home Page - News - Me.

Above are Local-Follow-Friends-Recommendations-Hotspots.

Chen Pingjiang flipped through it with great interest for a long time and felt that this current beta version had already realized 40% of the functions of later generations.

To be honest, it is already good enough and can be launched after a little improvement.

Zhang Yiming introduced: "We will launch the live broadcast function and Douyin Mall in subsequent versions."

After looking at it for a long time, Chen Pingjiang put his phone aside and said, "There is nothing wrong with the app itself. It is just some basic things. The most important thing is the core algorithm and content, as well as how you promote and operate it."

Chen Pingjiang is right. There is no functional difference between Douyin, Kuaishou and even the later Tencent Video. The most essential difference lies in the content, which is also the basis of Douyin's success.

In the previous life, TikTok would not be launched until the summer of 2016. The process was not all smooth sailing. The early data performance was actually not very good. Many people in the ByteDance team suggested giving up, but in the end it was Zhang Yiming who made the decision and persevered.

The reason to persist is simple.

What is logically correct must be right. Others have verified that this path is feasible. If you fail to do it well, it is your own fault.

Who are the so-called "others" here?

Naturally, it is Kuaishou and Musical.ly.

There is no need to talk about the former, let’s just talk about Musical.ly.

People who don’t know would think it is an overseas company.

In fact, this is a music short video social platform founded in Shanghai. It came out in early 2014, two and a half years earlier than Douyin. However, it initially focused on the North American market. Many people know that Musical.ly is the predecessor of TikTok, but the real sequence is: ByteDance first saw Musical.ly's product, then chose to make Douyin in China, and then acquired Musical.ly in turn, and finally changed Musical.ly to TikTok.

Musical.ly was gaining very good momentum at the time and was ranked number one in the US App Store for a long time, so it was a milestone for China's overseas expansion.

Before Musical.ly, China's overseas exports were mainly tool software, because tool software did not need to be compatible with foreign cultures, but Musical.ly was groundbreaking.

At that time, Musical.ly actually didn't have many competitors, and the most similar competitor was probably an app called Vine.

Vine focuses on 7-second short videos and was launched in 2012. However, it became a martyr because it was launched too early. At its peak, it had over million users.

Musical.ly developed smoothly in the past, but also encountered growth difficulties. At that time, it was mainly based on music gameplay and was relatively simple. Basically, it was to play a piece of music and then lip-sync to the movements.

Therefore, Musical.ly's user retention rate was far lower than that of Douyin and TikTok later on.

For example, regarding the monetization issue, Douyin later performed very well in China because it can accept advertisements, sell goods, and live broadcast, and its commercial value is very high. However, Musical.ly has no ecosystem at all, and no one can make a living from Musical.ly.

In China, in the era of Weibo, there were MCNs, account matrices, and people making money by taking advertisements. In the era of WeChat, there were self-media people who made a living by writing public accounts. Later, in the era of live broadcasting, there were many guilds.

Therefore, Chinese people’s habits of content consumption and online shopping are more advanced than those of the U.S. At that time, Musical.ly became popular in the U.S. first, so it went to the U.S. market and missed the opportunity to become TikTok.

They later tried to return to the domestic market, but TikTok had already emerged by then. So when it comes to entrepreneurship, time and space are even more important than direction.

Even more interesting is...

Because Musical.ly did not have a complete ecosystem, its ceiling was obvious at a glance. It wanted to return to China but could not compete with Kuaishou and Douyin, so it once wanted to sell it.

However, they failed to reach an agreement with Kuaishou and finally sold it to Zhang Yiming.

Zhang Yiming bought Musical.ly and renamed it TIKTOK.

After Chen Pingjiang's thoughts wandered for a while, he thought with a sense of humor: "Musical.ly may have just been launched, but there is no rush to acquire it. Let them go to North America to stake out a territory first, and then acquire it later."

Hearing Chen Pingjiang's question, Zhang Yiming replied: "We plan to use ABTest at the APP level, and adopt the method of separating the front, back and middle ends: the upper layer is a multi-port application, the middle layer performs filtering and distribution to the upper layer, and the bottom layer provides universal services. The advantage of this is that by extracting the common capabilities of all APPs, the workload of developing an APP is greatly reduced. It can quickly roll out a large number of APPs and verify which APP with the most popular name and style. Deploy all the data on the server and provide services by remotely calling the server data. This can ensure that the program installation package is very small and the content of the application is constantly updated."

“Let other products provide blood supply for TikTok!”

Chen Pingjiang rolled his eyes when he heard this. This was indeed very Zhang Yiming.

He did the same thing in his previous life!

A lot of apps have been created, such as Funny Journey, Connotative Jokes, Beautiful Pictures, Must-See Videos tonight, etc.

Chen Pingjiang waved his hand to stop Zhang Yiming's long speech.

"If you didn't have my support, you could have started like this, and through constant trial and error, you could have chosen the best product. But now that you have me and Renren, all this is unnecessary. Do you think Renren Weibo is just for show?"

Hearing this, Zhang Yiming's eyes lit up with a captivating brilliance.

Yes, isn’t this the huge significance of having the support of Renren?

"Well, I'll ask Li Xi, Lin Bin, and Wan Yuqian to come over tomorrow morning, and we'll have a meeting to discuss how to promote TikTok."

“Remember, you have the trump card at the beginning, so you must laugh last. If Douyin wants to surpass Kuaishou and other subsequent competitors, it must grasp the three words ‘new, strange, and beautiful’.” (End of this chapter)