Clicks the founder to talk about the pioneering road: once and VC is not entangled whether to burn money

Ups and downs, using this word to describe the group buying industry this year's situation is no exaggeration. In the thousands of websites that killed the league a year ago, the tick-tock is a low-key one--there is no large amount of money to burn when the tide, also did not go out to die on the beach; compared with other grassroots group buying station, the Tick group is also a big family, a water of Google senior sales formed a founding team.

Recently, the Tick group founder, Vice President Zhu received an interview with Sohu it, review of the founding team in the last year when group buying fiery indecisive, and investors noisy secret, but also told him about the bitter forced group buying industry development view.

Tangled 2011

"In the early 2011, our internal mentality was very anxious and tangled," he said. On the one hand, we are afraid of not large financing, burning money, the sale of sales, will lose market opportunities, on the other hand, we are aware of other group buying sites burning money to pay sales, http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/9378.html "> User viscosity is still very poor, repeat the purchase rate is very low, we are very afraid of the heart. And investors also give us great pressure. Zhu looked back at the tangle.

At the beginning of 2011, dozens of group buying websites, represented by the handle net, completed huge sums of money and subsequently attracted traffic through a violent advertising campaign and hit the scale of sales. The tick-tock group only won its first round of financing from IDG in 2010.

"At that time, the investors wanted us to make a second financing, burn the money as soon as possible, expand the sales scale and rush into the top three." And then many VC are doing so, their strategy is to expand the scale as soon as possible, listed. "Zhu said.

Under pressure and internal entanglements, the group's entrepreneurial team finally made a tough decision and struggled to convince the investor. "We decided to do it in a low-key way, not to do large-scale financing and to burn money to keep our style." "Zhu said.

And when it comes to making this decision, Zhu admits: "Maybe it's because we're all from Google, the impact of Google's precise concept is great, and we want to grow with products and word-of-mouth drivers." ”

Public data show that the Tick group CEO song has been Google China sales general manager, Vice President Zhu has served as Google China Channel operations director, Vice President Chin has served as Google China Senior channel Sales manager, Vice President Li Army also served as Google China Senior channel manager.

In the opinion of the founding team of the ticking group, group buying site large-scale expansion, the large-scale launch line, online advertising methods brought about by the real effective, viscous marketing effect is limited, this is with their previous experience is a violation, and this is the tick group did not wade into the muddy water of the important reasons.

2012: The group buying industry will be more efficient

"Now, many of the fantasies of the group buying industry have been dashed. In the past, everyone imagines that group buying is a hundred meters race, that needs to expand rapidly, fast listing, but now it seems that the illusion has been shattered, because the capital market is not recognized. At the same time, we used to fantasize that when the group-buying company was big enough, unit costs will be reduced, but now it seems that the illusion has also been shattered, because even if the team has to expand correspondingly, the merchant procurement costs are still similar, therefore, the cost is almost as the scale of the expansion and so on, the profit how to achieve it? "Zhu said.

In Zhu View, group buying industry many practitioners have also been aware of, only a higher efficiency, a variety of reasonable ratio, improve unit output efficiency, group buying companies have the hope of profit, the era of simple expansion of scale has passed.

The way to increase unit efficiency is to lower the cost of multiple sources of flow purchase and operation, as well as the focus on the sales team incentive.

According to Zhu's statement, the Tick group never launched a large-scale ad offline, but based on the analysis of the purchase of some high conversion rate of online traffic, at the same time, through micro-bo, QQ, mail and other ways to operate effective traffic.

"We also believe in our strong sales team management incentive mechanism, because the previous management team has the experience of managing large-scale sales and agents." "Zhu said.

According to the Tick, the site will be profitable in the first half of the year.