The success philosophy of Chen, the CEO of Mushroom Street

Mushroom Street is a focus on the fashion of female consumers E-commerce website, If you say "Taobao" and other shopping sites are the ultimate platform for trading, Mushroom Street is to attract buyers to buy the "shopping Guide", and Mushroom Street in recent years, the majority of female users are welcome, has entered the people's online shopping life.

What's a mushroom street? Mushroom Street CEO Chen to its positioning is: "Women's community shopping sharing class site." This fusion of "electric quotient", "community", "media" and other elements of the website, the start-up funds only 1.5 million yuan, the establishment of nearly 15 months, registered users have reached 9.5 million, solar PV (clicks) has reached 110 million, the monthly registered user growth of up to 2 million.

"Two rounds of financing received 20 million yuan mainly for the company's operations, marketing costs are all from the site revenue." Chen said that although the site has not been profitable, but to have such a performance, in the new internet companies "has been very difficult."

"Waterfall" type of screening guide

If you say "Taobao" and other shopping sites are the ultimate platform to achieve trading, Mushroom street is to attract buyers to buy the "Shopping guide." How to provide high quality and attractive products? Chen and his team have developed a "waterfall" model of product selection.

"It takes a lot of energy to figure out such a pattern," he said. "Chen Introduction, the so-called" waterfall "type of screening, refers to the user will be shopping site merchandise photos link to Mushroom Street, the photos will be displayed in the top of the homepage, but also began to fall like a waterfall, only constantly be users to share the photos will slowly rebound. "This sort of product must be hot and fresh. ”

This type of screening model with a U.S.-named Pinterest image social networking site has a lot in common, the model was introduced into E-commerce, in the country derived from the mushroom street, beautiful said, everyone shopping and other sites.

"Mushroom Street is different from these sites, not only in Mushroom Street to lead the introduction of E-commerce, the establishment of shopping-style platform, but also in its Operation mature network community model." Chen said that the user's share of the product and comments is just the first step in the community of the site.

On Mushroom Street, users are free to create interest groups such as "wear skirts all year round" and "We are all domestic skincare", where the team founders attract members by launching online activities, and the members create stickiness through topic discussions. At this time, the real online community can be formed.

Community into Mushroom Street to bring user growth at the same time, but also attracted a large number of shop sellers come to release merchandise. In order to ensure that the final display of the products of Mushroom Street can reflect the real heat, freshness, Chen and his team of engineers each quarter to update the algorithm, to identify, filter the source, to ensure that the products published on Mushroom Street for the target users.

"This is not only for the Mushroom street users, but also for the protection of revenue channels." Chen added that users can link to the online sellers who sell the product via Mushroom Street, and the seller will pay a certain amount of commission on Mushroom Street after a net purchase transaction is completed. At present, this is almost the only source of revenue for Mushroom Street.

Focus on consumer orientation

The success of Mushroom Street attracts many imitators, and even some people sell the so-called "mushroom body webpage" software. In this respect, Chen said: "The continued participation of competitors to promote the development of the entire industry, but the success of Mushroom Street is not a software can be replicated." The Electric business service platform should consider oneself in the end to provide the customer what value, but this value is other people cannot provide, in this way can differentiate to grow up. "Mushroom Street team members mostly from the" Taobao, corporate culture is also deeply affected by "Taobao." "But compared to Taobao's ' strong ', we are more introverted. Chen said, Mushroom Street pay more attention to freedom, give staff more space for development.

"A lot of services are launched, are first to find someone to do, do a good job of curing the model, and then seek development." "This mode of work has spawned many innovative service offerings," Chen said. "Mushroom Street has more than 90% of the merchandise point to Taobao, we first in the online aggregation of a large user base to form a community." In order to buy and other forms, users get the price of wholesalers, in order to change the consumer mode in the user's weak position in one bid, so that they enjoy the price of large wholesalers to pay for the convenience of a commodity. For example, "buy", a change to the traditional group purchase mode, by the buyers, the group, gather a certain amount of purchase, buyers and sellers to negotiate, to achieve lower prices to buy goods. "Now ' buy ' daily purchase volume can reach 10,000 pens." ”

Chen the Internet Enterprise Development to a "Quick fill empty table" process, mushroom Street in the future to do is to continuously provide valuable services, expand the scale, so, Chen is also recruiting, but he prefers "hoarding engineers."

"The good thing about hoarding engineers is that they can save a great amount of human costs by writing computer programs," he said. "Mushroom Street currently employs only about 70 people, half of them are engineers, the other half is responsible for website operation, brand building and other work." "Generally this size of the site, 300 people around the number of employees is relatively normal." Chen added.

It is understood that the daily average of 2.2 million visits to the Mushroom street, 80.9 million of users every day to lead to Taobao, and in Taobao generate about 5 million yuan of turnover, Mushroom Street can get more than 100,000 yuan per day commission. In 2012, the turnover of Mushroom street is expected to reach 3 billion yuan. "In the future, Mushroom Street will build a community, but also understand the electric business, understand the media of the complex team, so that the site can continue to successfully go on." ”

Expert comments

Li Zhi

Partner of Amoeba Capital

Mushroom Street as the representative of the Electric Dealers "shopping Guide" community, the rise of the network shopping more mature representative. Taobao previous user experience relatively single, that is, Taobao is the most popular design of the shopping experience and sorting rules, which is equivalent to "mass supermarket", Taobao Mall is also "department store". And with the maturity of the online shopping environment, consumer demand is more and more diverse, such as Mushroom Street to meet the girls through social referral, share the demand to decide their own purchases, and not just see which business goods sales good, or the latest time to release new products. Similar market segments also have rebate nets, group buying nets and so on, have catered to a variety of market segments. For example, Apple's App Store, you will see "Time-limited free", "user recommended" and many other market segments appear. This is a sign of more and more mature electric dealers, better solve a lot of businesses, commodities are not out of the question. There is bound to be more and more similar market segments.

The rapid growth of Mushroom Street also shows that having a strong executive team and a keen sense of market smell are essential elements of success. Founder Chen originally in Taobao with user Experience team, has been a product manager, is a very thoughtful boy. In fact, Chen just started the project is rolled beans NET, a Taobao based on the ads, but this project is not too successful. After more than six months of practice, he keenly found the current mushroom street for women's social shopping direction, to maximize the hottest social model of interest and business done a perfect combination, and the combination of innovation in the United States has not been particularly direct examples can be referred to. This discovery, and Chen's insight into the interest map and his deep understanding of Taobao is inseparable. If you want to, in China can also go out of the road of innovation!