Review and summary of the first web entrepreneurial days

I have been back in Shanghai for more than January. Every day I want to record the days of the past nine months in Qingdao. This is a review and a summary. Today I am writing this article. I officially joined the Baba change team in May 15, 2006. In March 2006, I started to contact the person in charge of the Baba change team. after my New Year's Day in, my colleagues and I planned to create a network project that I liked to do. I chose a lot and thought a lot ,, in the end, I decided to create a Chinese site similar to Snapfish.com or Shutterfly.com to provide users with a more convenient and personalized online photo printing service, and even the children who go to school in the United States in the future, our website delivers photos to parents in a small county in China within hours. let our site become a Chinese partner of Snapfish.com to help them take orders for English users to fl and distribute in China.

When I was doing a market survey with my companions, I found that Baba changed the website. His homepage is similar to the page style I imagined. Of course, we were all affected by the influence of Flickr.com. then, I contacted the person in charge of Baba change through ALEXA. During the communication, I found that they already have a good team Foundation and the website is in the testing stage, cooperation with them can save a lot of time and give full play to the advantages of both parties. in all the promotion sessions, user experience is the most important to me and my partners. Facts have proved that this has also achieved good results.

Before joining, I went to Qingdao three times and met their team members. So I quit my job in Shanghai and moved from sales to the market. 51. Before I went to Shanghai to change my mind to something about activities, this was the first thing I did for Baba. Before I joined, he recruited a marketing staff, she was mainly engaged in this activity. According to her usual train of thought, she planned a "51 photography screening contest". At that time, she did not have a full-time artist, she found a part-time artist on the design activity page. Later, the artist became a good friend with me. According to him, he did very well at the time and did not have any thoughts, he is not satisfied with himself. Of course he is not satisfied with me at the same time, but we can only use it due to the constraints at that time.

"51 Shadow Photography Contest", address: http://www.bababian.com/competition/winner.htm

 

In this activity, we have a total of four websites that support us. In fact, we exchange advertisements, such as Daqi network, negative film Network (dipian.com), top 9 (ding9.com), and Cernet, at that time, Daqi network only changed to a small LOGO location on the "Forum Daquan" page. We were satisfied with the strength of Daqi, in addition, the fit between the traffic and user groups is not the best. The negative network died in the second half of, which was also a campus SNS website developed by a group of students.

About 100 people participated in the event. There were more than 200 works, but the figures were unclear. Among them, the most popular photos and albums were over 80, during this process, you may cheat by exploiting the rule vulnerability. this activity should have failed. After I arrived in Qingdao in December May 15, the activity was coming to an end, and I was not surprised by the result. it was really difficult to plan, and with limited strength, the number of users at that time was not big, so it was easy to show your face.

Before I arrived, Baba changed the database and went online after three months of testing.

 

What kind of website will Baba become? To whom? Who are the core users? Which groups can bring us value?

A website cannot be very tall. video sharing is very popular, so more than 200 people are doing this. I have always felt that the threshold for this service is higher, because there are not many people who can provide video works, let alone good video works, if we use a dumbbell as a metaphor, one is a participant, the other is a sharer, and the Middle Web site is an integrated platform. however, if it is light or heavy, you can imagine the result. maybe my metaphor is inappropriate. In fact, any project has a chance, but at different points in time, the opportunity is bigger or smaller.

What Baba changed to do is to store and share photos online. I have read a statistical data. There are more than 15 million photographers in China, and China is one of the world's largest consumer of digital cameras, similar data, for example, shows that the threshold for users to participate and share photos as a service content is very low. Middle school students, white-collar workers, and retired workers are all target users, so this group is huge and the market is huge, there are many theme topics available. Compared with other WEB2.0 themes, this is more like a public site.

 

Who are the core users of Baba change?

They are photography lovers. Don't underestimate this group. They are too important to Baba.

Reason:

1. This group determines the overall "quality" of Baba's website"

2. This group has brought abundant original works resources, rich activity Resources, a heated discussion atmosphere and promotion resources to Baba change.

3. This group is a guarantee for future profit.

 

Although we are also worried about the identification of core users, we are worried that we will focus our attention on photography users and whether they will become professional photography websites. We need to know the hummingbird, new photography, Oak photography network, etc, there are many photography communities and BBS in China, and there are also many hot ones. We will face direct competition from them, and we have no advantage. In fact, the worries are redundant. We use our strengths to achieve the best storage and sharing functions and the best user experience. In fact, there are not many direct competitors, we have always felt that there is no competition in this field in China. The only competition is that we are racing against ourselves, and our team members have long been consistent, this is also the principle in every step of the future.

Before I arrived, my colleagues did things in the market to pull people from sites such as new photography and Flickr. Later, the people who first came here, it has become a loyal user of Baba, and even has the feeling of being unable to give up. They have made great contributions to the change of Baba as their home.

The World Cup, which began in June 10, was a worthwhile topic for many industries. For Baba change, based on our analysis of users, we chose a group of college students for a centralized promotion. the reasons for choosing a college student group are:

1. College students are the concentrated group of sneezing on the Internet. (For more information about sneezing, see <long tail theory> );

 

2. College students are relatively concentrated groups, where information is quickly transmitted;

3. The importance of the World Cup for college students does not need to be emphasized. They can be grasped by football;

4. It is easy for us to calculate the promotion effect.

We chose DM as the promotion method and DM as the World Cup schedule. We chose 6.8 ~ 6.12 in the past few days, nearly 100 universities in 10 cities were centrally distributed, in dormitory units. One or two copies of each dormitory were arranged. We hope this competition schedule will take one month with them, and maintain a high degree of contact. we printed 0.2 million copies of DM, which is also very painstaking. The main content of DM must be the competition schedule, but the elements of Baba's change must be added. At the same time, in order to save activity costs, I also tried to seek sponsorship. At that time, I found several previous customers, including Coca-Cola and yangxiao. We designed a single page and added "partners: at the same time, the customer was tempted to distribute some ads resources on this site, because the amount I requested was not high, but I could provide customers with 10 central cities, 100 universities, 0.2 million dormitories, at least 1 million students, and one month of contact, we only need half of the total cost. It is really cost-effective, this is because the time is too short and the customer's process is too long to cooperate. finally, we chose a website with relatively high traffic, and the above mentioned price changed to an important advertisement space on their homepage.

 

Because of the tight schedule, in 10 cities, in addition to Qingdao, we need to print and contact the ground execution company and logistics company, distribution, execution, and performance monitoring. Less than 15 days before and after, the workload is huge. in order to save the cost, the ground execution company was confirmed at the last moment. In 10 cities, three companies were executed. if the money used in this activity is changed to the DM price of my previous media company, it is estimated that it will be difficult to distribute 50 thousand copies. However, even though this money is still a huge investment for a startup company, this is the only time I spent more than 5000 yuan on my job in Baba.

 

In fact, Baba has a certain amount of financial support, but it must save the cost and spend the least money to do the most things, to achieve the best effect.

However, this promotion was unsuccessful and did not deliver the expected results. At that time, we wanted to see a climax of registering users, especially student users through DM, but we waited for a month and the climax did not appear.

Where is the problem?

Some students reported that the campus network could not be changed!

We also think that this factor is also taken into account when selecting schools and cities. However, there is a problem in the implementation process due to our restrictions, our lack of supervision on execution companies is believed to have not fully followed our requirements. Coupled with the slow access speed of campus networks, this has led to a low peak, but a slow growth.

After that, all our promotion work targets no longer college students, but more for photography audiences and some specific partners.

During our communication and discussion with our peers, we gradually clarified the direction of market work and made full use of our photos and user resources (the characteristics of web, taking users as an example, users), make full use of our core function-storage!

In March, we started a series of cooperation and promotion plans, bababian OPEN, bababian Express, bababian Local ......

 

In an episode, we added the CC definition function on our website in June 11. Users can use the CC2.5 version to define the copyright of the work. during my communication with CC's project assistant, I mentioned that there are currently three official CC websites in China, which are authorized by CC, although these three products provide different CC versions. Later, I commented on the CC protocol used by a site similar to Baba's change from an unauthorized official organization. At that time, there was a certain degree of competition, I found a point to "attack" the other party, but I recruited a group of people to say nothing, so I kept it for several rounds. I am fighting with netizens "sneezes". They are very positive and passionate, but they also have colored glasses for Baba. Here I want to explain, the most fundamental intention of our cooperation with CC is to provide users of Baba Bian with a better user experience in protecting personal rights. Of course, from the perspective of cooperation itself, we were the first online photo storage website to cooperate with CC organizations in mainland China. It is understandable to use this for proper publicity because I am a merchant.

CC official reports http://cn.creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/0606111.php

Later, CC and Baba maintained a very good cooperation.

Qingdao is a good place. It is not impetuous. It has a cost advantage for project creation. However, the disadvantage is that the cost of cooperation opportunities is high and there are few opportunities.

A series of promotion plans:

 

Bababian OPEN: provides photo storage and sharing functions for many small and medium-sized BBS, BSP, personal BLOG, SNS, and other sites to quickly increase the number of registrars of Baba. Baba becomes more focused on storing and sharing photos. Many BBS and blogs cannot provide users with album functions due to financial or technical strength, let alone professional sharing functions. Through Bababian OPEN, we open api interfaces for BBS (Dynamic Network Forum, DISCUZ, PHPWIND), personal BLOG (PJBLOG, BOBLOG, ZBLOG, F2BLOG, etc.), BSP (OBLOG) SNS (such as Wealink) provide photo storage space and photo album Services. Some of these partners do not have their own photo album because of their choice, and some are limited by their strength, unable to provide enough photo storage space for users, and Baba changed as the earliest photo storage service provider to OPEN APIs, we are very fast in plug-in development, so through the OPEN plan, this has brought a good effect to Baba's change, including the increase in the number of direct users. At the same time, these users are very active "sneezes" and their own communication capabilities are very strong, through their platform, more people know that Baba has changed, and the number of records searched by search engines has increased significantly. I understand that the OPEN plan is a microcosm of making full use of Baba's storage function.

When it comes to plug-in development, our technical staff are indispensable. The various plug-ins in the early stage were developed by technical staff to contact enthusiastic users. In the early stages of development, we supported website development with the strength of users, this is very important. The reward for users is to provide some VIP accounts, post the developer's name on the plug-in on the website, and link it to his BLOG. It is too important for a loyal BLOGGER to increase the exposure of its BLOG. There is almost no practical effort for the change of Baba cloud, but it only uses the existing platform for users. This part also attracts more users to participate in the activities and plans of the change, there was a benign interaction, and I verified what I said, "Our resources include not only photos, but also the users themselves ".

 

Of course, this plan was not very smooth. I arranged a subordinate to do this job throughout July, but the actual results were not satisfactory. Only a few of them cooperated, many BBS or BSP have more or less concerns. For example, we feel that the plug-ins we provide are not perfect, we are worried about the loss of users, and the development process is not smooth. Although the results were not very satisfactory, August of newly registered users were included in the OPEN plan every day after 15%, and these users were basically valid users. In September and October, we cooperated with oak photography network, BLOGCUP, and PJBLOG plug-in promotion, which laid the overall effect of our OPEN plan.

 

Bababian Team: This plan is intended for enthusiastic users who help Baba to develop various plug-ins and programs. We regard them as a member of the development Team. They are enthusiastic and active, they have made a lot of useful suggestions for the change, so they are very precious. We have specially designed the Bababian Team Logo. Only they can add this LOGO to their personal BLOG. This is a sign and a proud and new member, we will publish a message on the official BLOG to introduce their resumes and Blog addresses, so as to encourage more users with technical backgrounds to make up for our shortcomings.

 

Bababian Local: this is an offline Local activity targeting users from all over the world. The first enthusiastic user in Guangzhou planned and organized a movie watching activity, which was quite successful, the highlights of the event are published on the corresponding teams and official blogs to attract the attention and exchange of enthusiastic users in other cities, afterwards, we held several local events in Qingdao, Beijing, and Shanghai, including outbound photos and gatherings, and all works will be shown in the change of Baba, my idea is to integrate users in the same city through activities to increase their interaction and drive the changed community atmosphere. These activities have basically achieved this idea, however, because the initial user base is small and there are fewer users in the same city, it cannot be continued. However, if you plan such activities and recruit enthusiastic user organizations, it is easier to do so, and the cities involved will be more extensive.

The above plans were all planned and carried out in July, some of which lasted for a short period and had different effects, but the starting point was to make full use of our existing user resources, "From the user to the user", based on this starting point, to think about the user's psychology, behavior characteristics, preferences, and so on, to inspire the user to believe that it is not difficult, at the same time, it is necessary to take into account the operability.