The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide

Chapter 285 × Facebook× Face Chat√

Zuckerberg's original entrepreneurial team was his college roommate at Harvard. Before they got investment, they had almost developed the software.

The first platform of anonymous social software created by Zuckerberg is undoubtedly Mphone, which is the smart phone with the highest market share at present.

If the definition is further narrowed to university campuses, Mphone's lead will be even more exaggerated. One out of every three smart phones in the world is an Mphone, and the ratio in universities will become 5 to 1.

The first thing Zuckerberg's team did after getting the investment was to increase the basic service lease of the new cloud, and then recruit a business manager who specializes in docking with the electronic payment platform.

At present, there are more and more electronic payment companies, and major Internet giants and traditional consumer companies are trying to enter this field, but for the vast majority of Internet companies that intend to access electronic payment functions, they still have no choice but to You can choose NewPay.

A commercial organization has done a survey, and a company has access to multiple electronic payment channels at the same time. NewPay accounts for more than 90% of both the number of transactions and the total amount of transactions.

Practical factors have made NewPay's advantages in the field of electronic payment more and more obvious.

"Although X.com, Amazon Pay, and C1it have advantages in commission and service fees, we still have no choice but to choose NewPay.

Because whether it is our actual offline experience or the survey conducted at the Boston Regional University Forum, it shows that NewPay has an absolute strong position in the field of electronic payment.

Not to mention that we have narrowed the scope to the Mphone platform, Mphone users, college students, and electronic payment users. After overlapping these three identities, I even suspect that the usage rate of NewPay has reached 100%.

We now have enough cash flow, and there is no need to choose an unknown payment platform for this service fee advantage, even if it is backed by a big name like Microsoft or Citibank. said Zuckerberg.

After recruiting the business manager responsible for docking the payment platform, the five-person team began to operate at high speed.

The only person who has to pay salary is the business manager. The other three people in the team are all Zuckerberg's roommates. They have no salary but stock options.

Of course, after getting investment from Goldman Sachs, even without wages, they seem to be full of energy.

Sean Parker, one of the original Facebook founders and Zuckerberg's roommate, said: "I just think we choose Newcloud for our infrastructure, NewPay for our payment software, and Mphone for our smartphone distribution platform.

I always feel that Newman's products are all around us, like the air is everywhere.

So I want to try, can we not choose NewPay. "

David Ibersman was the business manager they hired. He used to work as an analyst at Oppenheimer Investment Company. Five people crowded into a crowded office. Everyone could only stand. David stood at the whiteboard Pointing to Newman in front of him, he said:

"Getting rid of Newman's influence should not be considered by a small company like ours. Doesn't Yahoo want to get rid of Newman's influence? Doesn't AOL want to get rid of Newman's influence?

Could it be that thousands of Internet companies in Silicon Valley, large and small, who intend to make a career in the mobile Internet field, are willing to be coerced by the ecology built by Newman?

The products issued in the Mphone application store shall be drawn proportionally, and the use of NewPay shall be charged a service fee according to each transaction, and the advertisement fee shall be paid in order to obtain better advertising space in the Mphone application store.

The new cloud also charges, of course, this fee is reasonable, you go to rent a server, the service they provide is far inferior to the new cloud.

The ecology that Newman has built in the field of mobile Internet is so sound. Relying on the key application of electronic payment, Newman does not have to do anything, and other Internet companies are helping him.

When I was working in Oppenheimer, we met a lot of Internet companies, they want to break this situation, and even have an Internet studio dedicated to helping Mphone users jailbreak, they want to get investment, to help more Mphone users prison Break.

Of course this is illegal, we did not vote for this project. However, the ecology Newman built in the field of mobile Internet is more robust than the personal PC ecology built by Microsoft back then. After all, Microsoft did not make computer hardware and offline software supermarket stores.

Newman has done everything. The ecology he built is nested layer by layer and is very strict. Unless his ecology is directly used, I can't think of any way to not use NewPay.

This is not something we should think about. Personal likes and dislikes should not affect business decisions. In the late 1990s, Yahoo competed with Newman in the question-and-answer community. Isn’t it one of the most important content contributors to the Mphone ecosystem now? ?

What we have to do now is to make the product well and attract more users, and users will come as they like. "

David’s words cruelly helped the entrepreneurs in the ivory tower to more clearly realize the facts they knew but were unwilling to accept, and young people not much older than them built an unbreakable ecosystem.

Edward said: "I also heard that when I was taking an elective course related to the Internet, NewPay estimated that its market share was lowered, so as not to be sued by the federal court in the name of antitrust."

David agreed: "I have also heard similar statements. When other Internet companies are eager to say how high their market share is, NewPay's statistical caliber shows that their market share is only over 60%. seriously inconsistent with the facts.

Only later did our company know how they did the statistics. They went to the city with the lowest market share of NewPay to do the statistics. "

Zuckerberg interrupted the meaningless chat: "So we need to talk to NewPay, NewPay's service fee is relatively high, but we have no choice.

In addition, when we first started our business, we also considered which platform to launch our application on. The result of the discussion is still Mphone, right?

Since they all choose Mphone, what's the trouble in choosing NewPay? "

Why Zuckerberg’s team doesn’t like Newman, and it’s not that they don’t like Newman. They actually regard Newman as an entrepreneurial idol, but this mentality is contradictory. As a Harvard student, it’s normal to have a natural resistance to Berkeley students. up.

They hope to re-take the road of Newman's entrepreneurial success, and finally create their own ecology. The word ecology has become a popular vocabulary for Internet entrepreneurship following several Mphone developer conferences.

When investment managers and entrepreneurs talk about long-term goals, they are building ecology.

When you want to build your own ecology, but you have to contribute to other people's ecology, this kind of mood is frustrating.

"The last question we're going to talk about is what is our software called?" Zuckerberg said.

"AChat?"

"Meet U?"

Everyone expressed their opinions, almost all of which revolved around the two core elements of anonymity and chatting. They fell silent for a while, and no one could convince anyone.

Finally Edward said: "I think it's better to call it FaceChat, or FC for short.

Although we are an anonymous social software, the users who eventually chat with each other always have to go from anonymity to real identity, from online to offline, and finally see each other's face.

Calling FaceChat can distinguish us from other anonymous software on the market. "

In the end, the name Facechat was unanimously recognized by everyone and became their product name.

Zhou Xin learned from Li Jingyi that Facebook has become a Facebook chat in this era, and he couldn't help feeling that the changes he brought were too great.

Tencent didn't make games, Ali didn't make Taobao, and even Facebook became Facebook.

However, according to Zhou Xin's understanding, Tencent will definitely not go back to make games, but it is hard to say whether Ali will go back to Taobao. Just because you don't do it for now doesn't mean you won't do it all the time.

After the launch of Face Chat, starting from the Boston metropolis, it quickly became popular in college circles across the United States.

There are more than 50 schools in Boston. In addition to top universities such as Harvard and MIT, there are also secondary universities such as Northeastern University and Boston University. A large number of universities lead to a particularly large number of students here.

The face chat software is very similar to the Soul of the later generations. Users are anonymous, and then there is a square, which is similar to a post bar. Everyone can post on the square, and then the official guides the hot topics of the day.

When Zhou Xin experienced face chat, Zuckerberg was indeed a top genius, and he could still have face chat without Facebook.

"This idea is also interesting. Enter your own real information in the background, and unlock a real message after reaching a number of conversations.

Truly a genius idea. After a brief experience, Zhou Xin sent an email to Warren Johnson of Emerging Investment, asking him to pay attention to this company, and Emerging Investment can invest in this project.

Yes, at first Zhou Xin didn’t vote because he felt it was unnecessary. After all, without Facebook, he didn’t know and wasn’t interested in what Zuckerberg could do with an anonymous chat software.

Zhou Xin felt that Dingtian’s valuation of hundreds of millions of dollars was almost enough. After all, the valuation of POSTSecret, the ceiling of similar software, was there.

After the experience, Zhou Xin changed his mind. He realized that entrepreneurs who can become top technology giants have two talents. Even if he changes the world line, their radiance cannot be concealed.

The face chat software is simple and simple, it is a simple version of Soul, but it adds some interesting functions, that is, to unlock real information.

You can set a series of information such as your occupation, identity, name, city, etc. as unlockable conditions, including your personal photos.

Then set a step-by-step unlocking method. For example, after sending ten messages to each other, one message can be unlocked. The more messages you send, the more messages you will unlock, until all the information you enter is unlocked.

It is equivalent to a process of gradually exploring the identity of the other party during the chat process.

The number of unlocking messages here is fixed, and every 10 messages sent to each other is a step, but the total number of personal information that can be unlocked is set by oneself, and the sequence is also set by the individual.

This is full of creativity.

What makes Zhou Xin even more amazing is the profit model. The profit model of face chat is also very simple. After you become a member, others need ten messages to unlock your personal information. You can get a discount, and you only need eight messages from the other party. here you go, and you're unlocked.

This profit model will not change the gameplay of the software, and it will make users have the urge to pay.

The only problem is that the face chat model is not easy to advertise. If you only rely on membership fees, the upper limit is limited. Therefore, face chat is definitely not as high-valued as Facebook in later generations, but the value must still be there. In American’s It is not a problem to enjoy a market value of tens of billions of dollars in the financial system.

Compared with Internet companies in Huaguo, the biggest advantage of Internet companies in Silicon Valley is that they can be unimpeded on a global scale. Once their business models are formed, they can be harvested quickly on a global scale.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook are all like this.

Face chat gained 10,000 users in just one week, and this number became 100,000 in half a month. It is growing at an unimaginable speed.

When the number reached 100,000, five people held a simple celebration ceremony in Zuckerberg's small rented office, and Zuckerberg said: "It seems that we did a good job.

In two weeks, our number of users exceeded 100,000, and the number of paying users exceeded 10,000, which means that it can now bring us 100,000 US dollars in revenue every month, which is an astonishing number.

According to the private communication between the person in charge of the Mphone application store and me, this ratio is very rare, and it is one of the software with the highest payment ratio among applications other than games after the Mphone application was launched.

Before we celebrate, we need to think about a new question, that is, whether we want to introduce new investment institutions to quickly expand our market share, or rely on our own income to expand slowly. "

If there is no Zhou Xin, then there is no second answer to this question. It must be to quickly find venture capital, attract investment, quickly expand the scale, replicate the successful model in the United States, and blossom in more places.

After the success of Zhou Xin, entrepreneurs, especially those with a stable profit model, do not want to introduce venture capital institutions too early, because it means that their equity in their hands will be diluted and their interests will be taken away by venture capital institutions up.

Zuckerberg is also facing similar problems. With Zhou Xin in front, he really wants to rely on stable revenue to develop slowly, but because the success of face chat depends on product innovation and lacks a sufficient moat, he is afraid that he will be steady and steady. Being copied by other competitors to catch up.

Zuckerberg continued: "We're doing $100,000 a month in revenue right now, and that number will grow as we grow our user base.

At present, most of our revenue is placed on increasing hardware resources, because the number of our users is growing faster than expected. I plan to double the number of our employees within two weeks, that is to say We'll take five more people.

Then we moved to a bigger office. In this case, the cash flow of $100,000 is not enough to support us to do so many things. "