In the history of migrating innovative products from Silicon Valley, Quora, a social networking site, is a relatively special object to be examined-it is far away from business, it is also squeezed out by search engines and social networks. As a result, venture capitalists who are not at risk have high expectations. Many of China's pragmatic entrepreneurial teams are not interested in Quora, lack of motivation for copying. So far, Quora only has two eggs in China, and the eggs on the left are named Quora. The eggs on the right are named Quora.
This genuine internet experiment is worth looking back and summarizing.
Quora demonstration and StimulationIn 2009, when Facebook engineer charlie Cheever and Chief Technology Officer Adam d' Angelo left and founded Quora, their design philosophy was "subjective knowledge extraction ":
"By combining the answer voting mechanism and reward return system with strict identity requirements and a one-to-many adopter model, Quora finds the answer to the problem from the high-quality experience produced by collective wisdom, even a large number of users are used to sort answers." Starting from the product, Quora believes that Google and Wikipedia are too structured and machine algorithms are more sophisticated. When providing answers for knowledge, Quora focuses more on simplicity and popularity to meet the costs of most users, that is, we have to discard a few users with individual and deep needs. In normal communities, the support for Q & A interactions is extremely limited, not only cannot highlight high-quality content, but also cannot be easily retrieved.
<------------- <_ <Left-side view
As the market segments found have ample room for imagination-Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even WordPress can be more or less summarized into the scope of "impacted"-Quora's growth has been very smooth, in April this year, the 70-member Company announced that it had completed a C-round financing of $80 million, with a valuation of $0.9 billion, this is done in the absence of rational business models and the intention to curb the scale of community expansion. The actions of the U.S. capital market have once again stimulated Quora's two "illegitimate child" in China ". Just this month, it was reported that zhihu received a 22 million billion US dollars in Round B Financing. At the same time, it was rarely exposed by the technology media. Its founder Ji XIII also spoke out for the first time, this article describes the fruit shell model, "what is the fruit shell network?", has aroused industry attention.Zhihu and Shell
In March 2010, Quora received the first round of financing, with a start-up valuation of $86 million. In November of the same year, the fruit shell was launched. In December, zhihu was launched almost in the same period, these two websites are dedicated to operating high-quality content and high-quality users, and the niche market in the Internet is no longer available in China. At the initial stage, zhihu had a high degree of overlap with the users of the fruit shell. In particular, the active users at the collar level often contributed answers to zhihu and published articles in the fruit shell. In 2012, the fruit shell Q & A service was launched, allowing zhihu to strictly inherit the Q & A platform field of Quora. zhihu launched zhihu daily in 2013, the knowledge media field used to snatch fruit shells has also made the fruit shell team feel nervous. At the same time, the latest traffic data shows that the average daily PV of zhihu is about 6 million, and the average daily PV of the fruit shell is about 4 million-the former is slightly better in size, however, considering that zhihu's content is more broad, and the fruit shell is still deeply rooted in the general science industry, the overall gap between the two is very small and it is not highly competitive. However, zhihu is close to the shell. Zhihu's engineer culture (two of the three co-founders are technical backgrounds) helps zhihu develop its products. When zhihu app releases the second edition, its popularity in the IOS social classification rankings has exceeded that of Momo, and zhihu Daily App broke through millions of downloads two months after its launch. This kind of product-oriented operational thinking, this allows zhihu to efficiently capture users. In the heyday of Sina Weibo, guokan's scientist culture places great importance on the role of the media. In this age, guokan built a microblog propagation matrix from its founder to its product, mobile terminals are also configured with clients and public accounts, so in terms of news sensitivity, fruit shells often catch hot spots-the earliest was when Japan experienced a nuclear leak due to a magnitude 2011 earthquake in the spring of 8.9, panic sentiment frequently breeds rumors, and the fruit shell quickly gathers people to popularize science on topics such as the salt storm, which has been reproduced by a large number of media, the brand and credibility of the fruit shell have been expanded just right-the effect of the spread of four or two Jins determines the operational thinking of the media matrix pre-layout of the fruit shell. If we use 2013 as the starting point of the new scale, we know that the road to moving forward with the fruit shell is completely different.Zhihu: A hybrid experience and mutual assistance platform, a better "Douban" story?Today, it seems like I am talking about "a better Douban Story ". Zhou yuan, founder and current CEO of zhihu, once revealed his initial thoughts on the media: "zhihu will continue to produce high-quality and precipitated information, and associate valuable information with people." However, zhihu's implementation path centered on this initial idea is actually very close to the balance and trade-off between Douban's idealism and realism: polishing products over years, believe in the ability of algorithms to solve problems, and pursue the user scale, but do not take the initiative to contact specific users (except a few Kol), and do not rush to establish a business model. This is a matter of course. The so-called "linking valuable information with people" means Douban relies on books, videos, videos, and other media, while Zhizhi relies on the bond of Q & A and mutual assistance. As a matter of fact, according to a briefing by the investment institution, zhihu team will refer to three objects in financing, besides Douban, Quora and LinkedIn. Quora doesn't have to say much about it. Without it, I don't know it now. The emergence of LinkedIn is mainly about its brilliant achievements in realizing the value of networking-as early as 2010, linkedIn has achieved annual profitability-both B-end (enterprise) and C-end (User) can achieve monetization, if you can persuade investors to believe that it shares something in common with LinkedIn's future, it will also help increase valuation at this stage. That is to say, zhihu uses the story of Douban to persuade investors to "take a long line to catch a big fish", to provide a space for zhihu to "slow down", and then draw cakes to investors through LinkedIn, prove the high rate of return in the future. Instead, Quora is the first product in the sense of zhihu, but now it seems less important. Indeed, in terms of operation steps, Quora still follows the same trend: √ at the end of 2012, Quora launched a blog service, so that interested users do not have to stick to the Q & A form and can directly write articles, and entered the author's feed. almost in the same period, zhihu also began to test zhihu's column and tried to win self-media resources. √ At the beginning of 2013, Quora screened 100 Best Questions and answers for 18 categories such as science and technology, food, law, and literature, assembled the content into a book, and produced a 400-page pdf ebook; one year later, zhihu worked with the CITIC Publishing House to sort out the best Q & A under the category of "Entrepreneurship" for zhihu which had been established for more than three years and published a paper book "when starting a business, what are we talking about? √ In March 2013, Quora launched its official blog spotlight, which was used to Compile High-Quality Q & A within Quora and reposted and disseminated in the form of media. It mainly focused on hot topics with strong timeliness. In May of the same year, zhihu published zhihu Daily, a new product, and admitted to the media that this is an "Internet newspaper". Every day, zhihu made up dozens of questions and answers on its website, combining with current affairs, please those very resident users. √ Even a public speech from the founder, zhihudu and Quora are both in sync-in 2012, Adam d' Angelo, one of Quora's founders, said in describing the value of his own startup project: "the vast majority of human knowledge is not online, stored in the human brain in the form of experience, or exists in books and papers that only experts can read." In the same year, Zhou yuan, one of zhihu's founders, answered a question on the website about the origins of zhihu, saying, "the knowledge, experience, opinions, and judgment that a person's brain has never shared before, it's always something that another group of people really want to know." However, zhihu's product orientation makes its platform attributes passive: it is a user, not a station, and determines the content preferences on the platform. In zhihu, there was a question named "what is the gap between zhihu and Quora", attracting 23 answers. Most users know that they are far less professional than Quora, the majority of the smart products are less knowledgeable. I have also said on Weibo that zhihu is entering the club style of experience sharing, Q & A content such as "How do millions of people earn their annual salary live?" and "how to properly answer the 'three classic questions of girlfriends" fully enjoy the well-received onlookers, the user seems to be more interested in returning to God's reply with one another. In Quora, it is not difficult for professors from Ivy League to exchange academic questions frequently. If we gradually divide valuable information into "experience", "opinion", and "Knowledge"-"experience" is an induction of personal history, which is better than reading, being less reproducible, "Viewpoint" is an upgrade of "experience". Although still subjective, it has preliminary guiding significance, "Knowledge" is a "Viewpoint" that is still correct after multiple models are tested. It is the most universal. Quora, which insists on high-end groups, is more stable in balancing, the "community hydration" effect caused by the expansion of the number of users is relatively exquisite, but it is difficult to know how much it is out of focus in the process of increasing the number of users, and it is inevitable to be disturbed by the overwhelming competition. However, this kind of post-mortem is not fair to zhihu, because zhihu makes the "least bad" choice-it is not hard to see from the fall of the circle of friends, the user structure of the Chinese Internet is still a pyramid rather than a hexagonal structure. This is a risk that must be taken after the user scale is expanded, and it is also a challenge that zhihu must be cautious at the risk control level. In other words, if zhihu blindly follows Quora without taking geographical factors into account-such as controlling user growth and refusing to take the initiative to switch to low-end users-then this politically correct result may be disastrous. In the past, Hong Bo and Liu Ren used 5 gsns and WANG Xing used the overseas Intranet. Like zhihu, they imported a large number of seed users from the technology circle in the early stage, which quickly laid a high level of content and Relationship Quality, but in the end, the 5gsns and the intranets that indulge in the lock-up of the country are all wiped out in the dust of history. Therefore, zhihu would not hesitate to betray Quora's soul, is the "least bad" option that has to be made. What's more, China's capital market always converts the product value in units of the number of users. Even though the current 6 million users are still unable to handle the ups and downs. Although among the three founders of zhihu, coo Huang jixin has the highest appearance rate ("If You Are the One" helps a lot), CEO Zhou yuan is the leader of zhihu, this is a cross-border compound talent-a transforming technology reporter who wrote code and succeeded in the early years, zhihu has also had his own entrepreneurial experience before he was founded. He agrees that "as long as there are users in the future, there will be everything". As long as zhihu has not passed the rising period of user accumulation, there will be endless variables in the future, including the business model, and it will not simply "Focus on one positioning ".Fruit shell: to be enlightened and to do businessJi 13th, the founder of guokan, had a deep sense of idealism. Ji 13th, a doctor of neuroscience at Fudan University, followed his interest in playing the role of "scientific Evangelist" and embarked on the development path of "document by path. Before the establishment of Kochi, he was the founder of the NGO Public Welfare brand science Squirrel Club-science squirrel was initially running on a collaborative blog project. Interestingly, before joining zhihu, huang jixin is also a core member of the multi-person collaboration blog apple4us. This is another coincidence between zhihu and the fruit shell-after the science squirrel turns into an entrepreneur and creates a commercial media fruit shell, ji XIII has been paying for his idealism. In Ji 13th's own words, the fruit shell "took a 2-year detour" because it was too addicted to the idealized blueprint. In addition, it also made a mistake in team building because it had no entrepreneurial experience. The background of the age when the fruit shell was born is that pseudoscience is taking advantage of the Internet. The so-called pseudoscience has always been established in the environment of information asymmetry. It is essential for us to survive if it cannot be verified or cannot be falsified. Moreover, it is becoming more and more industrialized, for example, in the past, people forged UFO photos just to defraud cable fees from newspapers, and today's "mung bean health" propaganda is behind the scenes to promote the interests of some industries. Although the fruit shell has also studied the history of Quora, due to the higher threshold of popular science, the Q & A mechanism may cause scattered content. Therefore, the fruit shell decided to use its advantages to enter the commercial market, that is, to build a media Brand. Zhihu and the fruit shell actually both have the tradition of paying for the content (inviting users to pay for the content). On the fruit shell side, we need to convert obscure professional knowledge into plain dissemination articles, it is actually a cost. The reason why the fruit shell has invested a lot of popular science activities is to indirectly bring out the reputation of the fruit shell as a new media and endorse the business with the brand. The detour is that the new media itself lacks a huge profit margin, and the fruit shell targets new media itself and is limited to expansion. But for the fruit shell, this is also the only way to the other side, because if there is no media Brand foreshadowing, there is no qualification for secondary transformation. In 2012, the author of the fruit shell revealed one by one the false propaganda advertised by a medical institution named a4m (American anti-aging Medical Sciences Institute), and frequently attacked the fruit shell community as a public opinion platform, it attracted a lot of attention from traditional and online media, and eventually won a win-win situation in idealism and pragmatism: a4m's layout in China was frustrated, and it disappeared, the reputation of the shell also changes along with the hot topic. In the history of the fruit shell, this case is not uncommon. Every time it increases the social influence of the fruit shell, but its drawbacks are also significant: users are confused, the difference between the commercial brand shell and the NGO science Squirrel Club cannot be clearly identified, and investors are also confused. After all, the influence cannot be realized directly. The Internet media Brand iteration speed is fast, and there is no eternal growth, but it will only survive forever, the feeling of not being able to get the reassurance is quite confusing. Since the second half of 2012, the fruit shell has been brewing and launched a transformation plan. Under the ambitious ideal, more pragmatic businesses are needed to support it, ji XIII focused his strategy on the business model, introduced COO, set up a high-level team, and discussed the business. According to the popular concept, the fruit shell style is clear and has the brand characteristics of a large number of active fans, just like a large self-media. The Exploration of fruit shell commercialization since 2012 is also like the commercial exploration of the media, working with some commercial technology brands to tell them the brand story. According to a speech by Yao Di, COO of guokan network, on the third anniversary of guokan network, this commercial gameplay brought RMB 2012 and RMB 2013 to the guokan network in 5 million and 10 million respectively, in 2014, the target was 20 million. However, this clearly makes the fruit shell face new problems. If the fruit shell uses a large amount of content to cooperate with enterprises, it will lose the credibility on which it depends for a living, and it will be realized through community advertising, it also relies on quantitative changes to cause qualitative changes. This requires a large number of users to be imported, which is contrary to the positioning of high-quality communities. More importantly, with reference to the commercialization process of Tianya community, the article is only made based on an acre of land in an online community. The speed of income is not high, and the ceiling is also visible, so the capital is not interested.
In the end, we can see that what the fruit shell is determined to exert is to sink knowledge and enter the online education market. This direction is not the whim of the fruit shell. In the summer of 2012, the fruit shell online held the name "The Future of knowledge and learning", and the effect exceeded expectations. After Quora, coursera and Udacity systematically organize knowledge, turn users into students' online classrooms, and make sure that their brand audience and target online education users are highly overlapping. Coursera is a free Open Class program. One of its founders left Google in May this year to join Baidu's Stanford University Computer college Professor Wu Enda. Coursera has now received three rounds of financing totaling $70 million ($63 million in B round and $6 million in a round), and is hailed as a futuristic product that revolutionizes the traditional education industry in the United States. In 2012, the concept of "MOOC" (a large-scale open network course) was gaining popularity. Many of the top universities in the United States, including Columbia University and Princeton University, joined Coursera, provides higher education content for network users, instead of classroom videos for common open classes, and tries to issue diploma certificates. Obviously, Chinese universities are constrained by the system, and local education quality is also uneven. It is unrealistic to copy the Coursera model. What the fruit shell wants to change is the traditional mode of studying abroad. Studying abroad is a high-cost education model. It is only a physical revolution that hinders the idea of equality in education. Guokan established MOOC college. Firstly, it cooperated with overseas education platforms such as Coursera and EDX, translated and introduced overseas educational resources, and then imported its own users with a strong desire to learn, then, we used media brands to seek more course authorizations and try to create a distribution portal for global online education in China. Finally, for students who want to improve their knowledge, they can make a big commercial presentation and gradually sell value-added services.Challenges
Starting from the platform, zhihu is becoming more and more media-oriented, starting from the fruits of the media. Zhihu is a standard Internet company and is good at solving problems in a "light" way. Its business tentacles can be stretched far and scattered as users grow, and the cost of trial and error is very low: publishing, paid reading, paid consulting, social recruitment, self-media, mobile media ...... Every direction has an immeasurable return, so we know that we can continue to push forward slowly. The Internet has long proved that there will be everything for users. However, how can we ensure the uniqueness and order of the community if we know that the size of the community is increased by 10 times? If the community grows bigger, there will be two dead ends. One is the gangs and the possible Phenomenon of "bad coins drive good coins". People from the Forum era should not feel new; another final knot is the erosion of anti-intellectual culture. This is not a big problem for common communities, but it is quite special to know, especially its voting system, which can easily induce democracy to the population, in 2009, Tianya community held a "Tianya che you club logo collection competition", hoping to vote for the most supported designs by users, and finally win the championship (with a vote rate of over 50%) god's work is more like a prank that thousands of users jointly plan, making the operator of Tianya community quite dumb, it also makes those authors who submitted well-designed works feel helpless:The fruit shell is an academic company that specializes in "important" things. Before being a MOOC School, the fruit shell can hold hundreds of events in colleges and universities for one year, using student volunteers and campus channels to give extensive science lectures, and finally sink into the online education industry, is an in-depth use of the mass base. But think about Lee Kai-fu and his "" and Luo Zhenyu and his luogic thinking community. The fruit shell also has a chance in the cultural industry and fans economy, including crowdfunding, as long as JI 13th is brave enough, there is still a large original mine to be explored in the value potential of the fruit shell. However, the shortcoming of fruit shell lies in the fact that China's science and education categories and their markets are quite elementary. In the social customs of smiling and not smiling, both popular science and education are affected by utilitarian advantages, ji XIII believes that the fruit shell is to "bring the advanced way of life to some people", but it is too luxurious to promote your cultivation in the impetuous world, or to sell your honey sugar or skin cream for him. A really diligent and studious user may not have that much time to play with the fruit shell on the Internet. How to solve this conflict will be a key to determining the abrupt change of the fruit shell.
