The most talked about entrepreneurs in the Internet circle

Sina Technology Panfei Hu

June 4 afternoon, Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing, an office. Zhang Yiming grabbed the time to walk outside the meeting room, first across the glass to the familiar reporters waving, just opened the door, squeezed through the narrow channel, sat down at the other end of the table.

The young man in Fujian has just been in the thirties, but has become one of the most watched entrepreneurs in the Internet circle. He had previously worked on creating Courier, Rice, and Nine-Nine, and is now doing an IT application called "Today's headlines." He just completed a $ 100-million round C round this week.

However, in front of reporters Zhang Yiming, more like a "otaku" engineer. He is of medium build, looks plain, wears a pair of myopia glasses, a light-colored T-shirt and casual trousers that are not much different from the rest of the company. His men prefer to call him "Yat Ming" instead of "General Zhang."

Zhang Yiming technical background is not used to dealing with the media. Prior to the A and B round of financing, today's headlines are not widely publicized; to the C round, the company's marketing department "persecuted" Zhang Yiming, a small media communication to facilitate the promotion, he rarely came Spotlight.

In the view of Zhang Yiming, increasing exposure in the media will be an important attempt at today's headlines in 2014. Today's headlines, born in August 2012, have also entered a new phase of development with the arrival of 100 million U.S. dollars.

C round of financing is the leader of Sequoia Capital, and today's headlines closely Weibo (18.78,0.46,2.51%) with the vote. There is anecdotal evidence that the two companies valued the headlines at today as high as 500 million U.S. dollars, and Zhang Yiming laughed that the actual figures would be even higher.

Behind the high valuation is the beautiful operating data of today. The company currently has just over 200 people, but in less than two years it has gained 120 million active users and has 13 million daily active users.

In the middle of last year, the first round of financing completed the $ 10 million Series B round of financing including Heiner Asia and DST. Since then, it has become the darling of capital chasing. "Investment agencies come in every 12 months to ask us about our operations, and our consideration at the time was that we had to consider C rounds after the Spring Festival," said Zhang Yiming.

The latest round of financing has proceeded smoothly, and the two sides agreed to finalize the plan only a month later. More importantly, Zhang Yiming and his team did not lose control of the company because of financing; Sequoia Capital and Weibo also did not set milestones for the operational and financial targets for today's headline, the pace of development is still controlled by the company .

Zhang Yiming repeatedly stressed that "our company is not very radical." In other words, he would not compromise on compromise for higher valuations, nor would he willingly commit himself to the highest bidder. He will go to pick the most suitable investor, one of the criteria is that the other party can understand what the headlines are doing, not in a hurry.

He hopes to maintain the company's independent development, steady, will not consider selling, not listed on the cash market. He does not require higher and higher valuations for the financing, but rather on the basis of "how much we ourselves need to reach our next goal". The smash hit but vanished Eslite was considered as negative material.

But headlines are clearly accelerating today. In 2014, there are an additional 100 employees in the headlines today, and the number of servers is doubled on the basis of 1,000; it launched the "media platform" two months ago, and overseas expansion is on the verge of landing.

Whether willing or unwilling, Zhang Yiming's "engineer" attribute is bound to fade, and give way to the "CEO" and "helm." He needs to step in today's headlines with "not bad money" and gradually embrace new ways of playing to solve new problems.

evolution

Time back to 2012. In the spring of this year, Zhang Yimin resigned as a nine-nine-room CEO and turned to the headlines of the latest venture.

This is a thing that made him "hard". It realizes what Zhang Yiming has always imagined: "There should be something that appears to be a more efficient media property." The popular saying is that as soon as a user opens a mobile app, the first thing they see is what they are interested in, rather than manually Editing information.

Behind the headlines today relying on a set of recommended engine, users in the use of microblogging, QQ and other account system login, the machine algorithm will keywords and other elements to determine the user's hobbies, crawling content from the entire network, and to achieve news, blogs, questions and answers Such as the pan-media content personalized recommendation.

Zhang Yiming came from a famous university computer major and did not lack technical skills. Previous entrepreneurial experiences also let him understand how to make a good mobile application. However, the "personalized recommendation" such a subdivision function into a perfect product, there is no precedent for success in the country.

He decided to "save the curve", the first to do two more clever, the audience a wide range of applications, and then import users for today's headlines. These two applications named "funny 囧 map" and "connotation paragraph", the selling point at a glance. They have been successful in App Store (644.82,7.28,1.14%), ranking among the top 20 for a long time, accumulating hundreds of thousands of daily active users.

Zhang Yiming's team subsequently developed a "cross-redemption system" to guide users to headlines today. Throughout 2012, today's headlines cost only $ 1 million for promotion costs, but at the end of the year more than 1 million daily active users have been achieved, and a single activation has cost less than a cents per user. .

In 2013, the sibling application's driving role began to weaken, and the headlines started to focus on the development of Weibo and WeChat today. More than a dozen million users a day will be able to share news with Weibo from today's headlines, almost double the number of similar products ranked second. On the other hand, the use of online opinion leaders has also gathered much popularity for it.

By the middle of this year, the number of daily active users in today's headlines has increased to three or four million and its play has changed. Like most apps, they're starting to take third-party store channels. For example, Meizu Application Center mobile phone home page, the headlines today appeared in prominent conspicuous position.

The first year of business, Zhang Yiming like to spend less, less cost way to solve the problem; but with the completion of the B round of financing, Zhang Yiming has realized the importance of promotion, began to gradually increase market costs. C round of financing, the daily headlines of today's daily active users reached 10 million level.

In 2014, Zhang Yiming not only to adhere to the traditional promotion channels, but also set his sights on the phone pre-installed. He has been in contact with many domestic and foreign manufacturers, but not yet made much progress.

platform

In addition to efforts to promote and practice, a more profound change is also quietly occurring, and the catalyst for the role of today's top online media platform in April.

This platform is played, the media and since the media in the headlines today to open an official account, publish content every day. After a manual review, the machine will match the high-quality content to the corresponding keywords, and personalized recommendations. Its propaganda slogan is "another tiny voice can headline."

Today's headlines in the web version of the conspicuous location on the right opened the media platform entrance, which shows its importance. Up to now, thousands of enterprises, media and independent authors have settled in. There are not only media such as CCTV Financial and Business Weekly, but also happy business organizations like Donghua Citroen and Dongfeng Citroen.

For these accounts, Zhang Yiming set a very wide range of access standards, as long as not illegal. Although clearly pointed out that "marketing class account will not be passed," but he admitted that the user inside the account entrainment "private goods", such as Taobao shop links, and will not be blocked; only two-dimensional code exception, because it will interfere user experience.

Despite the repeated emphasis on "not content", but pushed by the media platform, the contents of today's first push will be more and more labeled "homemade" brand. The initial stage of almost no fortification settled rules, so that the rapid expansion of this platform at the same time, it will also be a mixed bag.

However, from a positive perspective, the media platform is not only expected to create a competitive barrier to differentiated content for today's headlines, but will also greatly ease the controversy over copyright.

Over the past six months or so, Zhang Yimin and his team have gradually abandoned the transcoding of pages that have led to many controversies. Users click on the title of the information in the mobile terminal, in most cases will go directly to the original website. But this approach will face the original site server instability, or the page is not suitable for mobile devices and other issues, affecting the reading experience.

In the media platform on the line, the headlines today will naturally have the copyright exemption. It does not intend to charge the platform author; Zhang Yiming view, the media platform will play a role in content distribution, marketing and CRM (customer relationship management) and so on.

Another change is that headlines today are adhering to human intervention as a supplement to the machine recommendation. They set up a "support group" to assist the machine in data training and correction.

However, Zhang Yiming is still skeptical. He cites an example: "Once I saw an article about a popular mobile phone released by Samsung, and I asked why it was recommended to me, and my colleague said he feels very important, that is, maybe someone thinks Very important, but not important to many people. "

income

In terms of how to make money, today's headlines have already started their first attempt - informational advertising. As of now, this revenue already covers the daily expenses of today's headlines.

To Zhang was relieved that the insertion of text links or image ads between information practices did not lead to massive protests by users. "Often a friend asks, do you have any income? I say yes, the other asked, where did not the ad be noticed," he said.

The number of ads is not large, the user only show up to 4 times a day. If you do not like it, users also have the option of "not interested" to hide it. Zhang Yiming hope that the impact of advertising on the user experience should not exceed 4%, the measurement criteria include reading the number and duration of information.

Its advertisers come from industries such as automotive, consumer electronics, finance, internet services and electronics. Zhang Yiming is not familiar with the specific sales data, but from the feedback he received, Bacheng advertisers are satisfied with the conversion results.

Today's headlines also hope to use the recommendation engine to do more accurate things, such as e-commerce. "For example, the analysis shows that users are interested in luxury goods, give him luxury goods and advertising, we have cooperation with Taobao and Breweries." Zhang Yiming said. He disclosed that the delivery of electronic products would be better and the non-standard goods such as apparel would be rather poor.

Advertising will be the only profit-taking point for today's headlines for some time to come. So, holding 100 million US dollars of Zhang Yiming, in the next year intends to do?

At present, users daily use today headlines for 40 minutes, browse a dozen news. Zhang Yiming intends to do more work on the refinement of the data: "For example, how many times is this article underlined?

He is thinking more about interaction with Weibo and wants to explore more possibilities beyond "Weibo sharing." But so far, the two companies have not had time to discuss the specific programs, financing contracts are not specified. He is also plotting to go abroad, expand overseas, and set up a dedicated team for it. He is expected to move during the year.

He is very confident that today's headlines at least within a year can not see pressure from competing products. "Pan-information platform" is the headlines of today's self-positioning; Zhang Yiming hope C round of financing 100 million US dollars into infrastructure and product development, continue to practice internal strength.

But change is already in progress. How to make new breakthroughs in marketing, content and commercialization will be the challenge for Zhang Yiming and today's headliners after "not bad money".