Accelerating Gem's entrepreneurial logic: playing business-to-business and the combination of the business

Mr. Li, the accelerator founder, is not superstitious about mobile internet users, and he is more worried about speeding up the profitability of such capital-intensive services. At first he thought that the flow of traffic is a rigid demand, but now feel that the acceleration is the future; Many mobile app developers believe this is true: if the business model is not clear, circle the user first. Once you have a user, the profit model will follow. This is a way of thinking, but not all companies are suitable, especially for capital-intensive enterprises. Mr Li is one of the founders of the hesitant attitude. Compared with many young entrepreneurs, the traditional IT industry, people to middle-aged Li Electric Sen seems a little conservative. Li Electric Sen's Company (Beijing Flash-Tech Co., Ltd.) has developed a "rapid flow of compression meter" and "accelerated treasure" two mobile apps. The former can achieve the compression of the Internet traffic, to achieve the purpose of saving the flow, the latter provides the Internet acceleration function. These two products close to the user, currently has about 5.5 million of the user volume. This is in line with Li-Sen's entrepreneurial logic--c the number of users, the future has a huge space for imagination; But Mr Li is not superstitious about the "user-volume" indicator, which is a practical consideration of the unclear client business model, because the company needs support from other sources of revenue. Titanium Media reporter and Li-sen sat down to chat when he was on the verge of a few deals. These business intentions amount to about millions of, but they are not from the client side (c side), but the enterprise side (b-side). Li Electric sen do is but the speed of mobile Internet service, he is how to business enterprise users go up? How to accelerate the treasure to get the B-and C-end of the balance beam? "Rapid flow of compression meter" unexpectedly hot, bottlenecks in the accelerated Treasure February 2012, Li Electric sen New Oriental online CTO's position to leave, began a career. The idea of technical origins made him want to develop a tool that could be used by many people at first. He noted the "20th phenomenon"--20th a month, mobile phone traffic is running out, people will reduce the frequency of internet use of mobile phones. He thought that the province traffic is a mobile internet "rigid demand", therefore has developed one can compress the mobile phone net traffic the mobile app--"the rapid flow compression meter". "Rapid Flow Compressor" Operating mode is: After the user installation settings, it can through their own server to the user when the Internet HTTP content processing (thin source code, JS, CSS files, image compression, etc.), so as to achieve the effect of compressed traffic. This with the general mobile phone assistant, flow monitoring applications (such as the same period of the flow of the wall, rainbow Flow, flow savings master, etc.) has a different technical principle. This is a completely experimental product, just to test whether the idea is feasible, even the original server is a second-hand. However, it received an unexpected effect: After the App Store shelves, 91 of mobile phone assistants will be "rapid flow of the compressor" crawl to their own platform, the first batch of users in Millet and otherThe Android Forum posted recommendations on the initiative, allowing users to surge to 100,000 in January. The sudden influx of users let Li Electric sen unprepared. He began to rush to fire--the server is often overloaded, bandwidth encountered bottlenecks, the program also problems, he had to expand the server and bandwidth to solve. "Not at all the pace we imagined. "These questions were not taken into account at the outset, let alone promoted," he recalls. He knew nothing about the channels and promotion of mobile Internet. "The rapid flow of compression meter," The unexpected hot Let Li Electric sen think this road feasible. However, its bottlenecks are also obvious: first, the business of compressing traffic is no more visible than the other mobile internet services, and second, whether the compression flow can be a "just need" is also a problem--3g times, the flow of money is getting cheaper, Li Electric Sen's friends (including himself) have not cared much about the traffic. Therefore, at the beginning of this year, Li Electric Sen developed the "Accelerated treasure". The app runs in a similar way to the "fast flow compressor," but the function is not to compress traffic, but to increase the speed of the network. "I think acceleration is a more original demand." After all 4 G, the speed is very fast, but does not mean to anywhere fast, such as the App Store download. Some routes are far away from you, backbone bandwidth is limited, so the connection between the point-to-point is sometimes slow. "" Accelerated treasure can reduce the transmission of content, the content of the transmission is less, the effect of acceleration is better. This is a change of mindset. "said Li Electric Sen. Currently, he has deployed thirty or forty servers across the country to enhance the acceleration effect. Enterprise-oriented, "castles" in the "rapid flow of compression meter" released months after the release, Li Electric sen constantly expand the server and bandwidth, the product maintenance. Although Li-Sen and several friends (including Angel investor Shire) pooled millions of yuan at the start of the venture, this is a capital-intensive business, and the fact that it is not going to make him start thinking about looking for investment soon. "It's good, but it doesn't make money." Li Electric sen to the Titanium media reporter to repeat at that time touched some VC to their product evaluation. "At the beginning of the time, a lot of people say that there is no need to make money, I also use this way to comfort themselves." But when you do, you always want to make money--because now you have a problem, what if the money chain has a problem? "It was the summer of 2012. To get funding, Mr. Li has come up with a way to make money: to provide accelerated services to the B-side. Compuware Company's data statistics show that most mobile users can wait for the Web site or application of the maximum load time is 5 seconds, 74% users said if the mobile site can not be loaded in 5 seconds they will exit, if the application can not be loaded in 5 seconds after the completion of 50% users will leave. At the same time, Li Electric Sen found that many developers in the product side has a strong ability, but the server side is very weak. "We distribute servers all over the country, both to help themImprove speed, improve the user experience, and help them save money. "said Li Electric Sen. In addition to improving the user experience for customers (increasing the speed of data transfer), their services are cheaper than the enterprise's own purchase of a multi-line room service, so they can save money for the enterprise. According to Li Electric Sen, there are several mobile app companies and they have reached a cooperative intention, the amount of interest amounted to millions of yuan. And in the initial search for financing, these are only the idea of Mr Li-Sen. "I just gave them a general time plan, such as when to come online and when to balance payments ... Wait a minute. That's Gao! "said Li Electric Sen. Li Electric Sen painted the "cake" won the favor of an overseas fund, accelerated treasure thus won a round of 3.5 million U.S. dollars financing. The app accelerator is essentially an "upgraded version" of the traditional CDN (Content distribution network) service, Li said. In addition to the content distribution services that CDN can provide, they can speed up the processing of the content and improve the network speed of mobile apps. The business-to-business are responsible for making money, and the business is the beauty of the flower. "Now 2B is earning money for the family. 2 C is the future. C End so many people, each give you 2 dollars a year contribution, is a considerable number. "said Li Electric Sen. He calculated the company's promotional capabilities and some channel resources. If all open, one months will probably add 6 million or 7 million users. But he did not choose to use channels to increase the number of users. At present, the accelerated treasure is only through the start of the way with pea pods and other channels of cooperation, and has not been deliberately promoted. "We're not going to promote it aggressively. Although the 2C and 2B development, but 2C promotion I will choose to do when the profit model is more mature. Because we don't have enough money right now. 2 c need to raise, the user to raise large. "Suffer from not set up a sales team, the current Acceleration PO sales and promotion are also Li Electricity sen One person in the lead." In terms of sales, Li Electric has found some companies to do the app through friends, directly to their CTO to show the third party network optimization monitoring the results of the acceleration effect. In this way, Li Electric Sen and several of them to work together (as of the news at the deadline, Li Electric Sen has not signed an agreement with these companies, so this article does not mention the names of these companies or apps). In the promotion, Lee in various fields selected a number of typical app to try, hope that after the success of the experience to replicate to the promotion. There are several ways to support your family through the B-terminal: One is to charge according to the number of calls (such as 10,000 calls Mao money), and another one is to charge according to the flow of traffic (mainly for video and other traffic relatively large applications). There are two types of charges per flow, by bandwidth and by number of bytes. At the same time, Li Electric Sen does not think the C-terminal charge is remote. He envisions many possible business models (mainly B2B2C) for the future C-Terminal: for example, the provision of large data, the user data provided to the partner to dig out of it, or to buy carrier traffic, attract users, and then cooperate with the game, provide free download and use of traffic, into the game distribution channels ... Of course, the success of the B-terminalago, everything was just a plan. The biggest challenge is its own short board as usual, the titanium media reporter asked about competition barriers and how to coexist with competitors in the industry. "It's not very difficult to build a prototype," he said. Difficulty in the next step: When the user is large, how do you guarantee the user experience? Your user opens a webpage, depends on the factor is very many, first is the network distribution, the node deployment, the second is the compression technology itself optimization, then has to the content processing: reduces the request number, the TCP/IP processing, the protocol acceleration ... These difficulties are very great. It's not that much that can be done better in these areas. "said Li Electric Sen. In fact, many CDN providers are also providing TCP/IP acceleration, including some giants. This goes back to the enduring topic of competition between a business of a big company and the entire business of a small company. "It won't be hard for CDN to do this to us. But to achieve the current effect, still need at least six months to a year of time. Li Electric Sen estimates, "CDN manufacturers to do this thing, it will not be a price war and other ways to confuse the market, so that the CDN service itself is a weakening." "At present, the market has not yet similar products." Li Electric Sen has been with some people in the industry, the current view, this business has not been their attention. "But don't rule out anyone wanting to do it. "For first-time entrepreneurs, the challenge comes not only from potential competitors in the industry, but also from in-house recruiting, and the establishment of management and sales teams." The more perfect management mode is a big problem that Li Electric Sen has to solve at present. The small team of several decades is well managed, but as team members and customers grow, the existing management model is challenged. In fact, I have some management experience, with a team of dozens of people, in Lenovo as a super server, with thirty or forty people, senior technical team. Later in the new Oriental to do CTO, but also the management of dozens of teams. I'm responsible for the technical stuff. "said Li Electric Sen. His biggest worry is the sales team. "In the early days there are not many obstacles, because I did not manage sales before, so the latter may be a big challenge ... It's not easy to start a sales team in the past two months. Li Electric sen helplessly laughs. Some of his friends, though willing to help, were unwilling to devote themselves to the effort. How to get talent from a big company to take refuge in such a small start-up company? That's the biggest problem the company needs to solve next.