Zuckerberg's original entrepreneurial team was his college roommate at Harvard. Before they attracted investment, they had almost developed the software.
The first platform for anonymous social software created by Zuckerberg is undoubtedly the Mphone, which is the smartphone with the highest market share at the moment.
If the definition is further narrowed to university campuses, Mphone's lead will be even more exaggerated. One out of every three smartphones in the world is an Mphone, and the ratio in universities will become 5 to 1.
The first thing Zuckerberg's team did after receiving the investment was to increase the basic service leasing of the new cloud, and then recruit a business manager who specialized in connecting to the electronic payment platform.
At present, there are more and more electronic payment companies, and major Internet giants and traditional consumer companies are trying to enter this field. However, for the vast majority of Internet companies that plan to access electronic payment functions, they still have no choice. NewPay can be selected.
A commercial organization has conducted a survey and found that a company has access to multiple electronic payment channels at the same time, and NewPay accounts for more than 90% of both the number of transactions and the total transaction amount.
Realistic factors have led to NewPay’s advantages in the field of electronic payments becoming increasingly obvious.
“Although Amazon Pay and C1it have advantages in commissions and service fees, we still have no choice but to choose NewPay.
Because whether it is our actual offline experience or the survey conducted at the Boston Area University Forum, NewPay's absolutely strong position in the field of electronic payment is shown.
Not to mention that after we narrowed the scope to the Mphone platform, Mphone users, college students, and electronic payment users, after these three identities overlapped, I even doubted that the usage rate of NewPay reached 100%.
We now have enough cash flow on hand, and there is no need to choose an unknown payment platform for this advantage in service fees, even if it is backed by big names like Microsoft or Citibank. " Zuckerberg said.
After recruiting a business manager responsible for connecting to the payment platform, the five-person team began to operate at high speed.
The only person who has to be paid is the business manager. The other three people on the team are all Zuckerberg’s roommates. They have no salary but stock options.
Of course, after receiving the investment from Goldman Sachs, they seemed very motivated even without wages.
Sean Parker, former co-founder of Facebook and Zuckerberg’s roommate, said: “I just think we choose Newcloud for our infrastructure, NewPay for our payment software, and Mphone for our smartphone distribution platform.
I always feel that Newman products surround us, as ubiquitous as the air.
So I want to try, can we not choose NewPay. "
David Ibersman was the business manager they recruited. He used to work as an analyst at Oppenheimer Investment Company. Five people were crowded into a crowded office. Everyone could only stand. David stood at the whiteboard. Pointing at Newman in front of him, he said:
"Getting rid of Newman's influence shouldn't be something a small company like us should consider. Doesn't Yahoo want to get rid of Newman's influence? Doesn't AOL not want to get rid of Newman's influence?
Is it possible that the thousands of Internet companies in Silicon Valley, large and small, who plan to make a career in the field of mobile Internet, are willing to be coerced by the ecosystem built by Newman?
Products released in the Mphone App Store will be charged a proportional commission. Using NewPay will require them to draw a service fee based on each transaction. If you want to get better advertising space in the Mphone App Store, you will have to pay advertising fees.
Xinyun also charges fees. Of course, this fee is reasonable. If you rent a server, the services they provide are far inferior to Xinyun.
The ecosystem Newman has built in the field of mobile Internet is so sound. With the key application of electronic payment, Newman does not have to do anything. Other Internet companies are helping him work.
When I was working at Oppenheimer, we met with many Internet companies. They wanted to break this situation. There were even Internet studios dedicated to helping Mphone users jailbreak. They wanted to get investment to help more Mphone users. prison Break.
Of course this is illegal and we did not invest in this project. However, the ecosystem Newman has built in the field of mobile Internet is more complete than the personal PC ecosystem built by Microsoft back then. After all, Microsoft does not make computer hardware and offline software supermarket stores.
Newman has done it all. The ecosystem he built is nested layer by layer and is very tight. Unless his ecosystem is directly used, I can't think of any way to avoid NewPay.
This is not something we should think about. Personal likes and dislikes should not affect business decisions. In the late 1990s, Yahoo and Newman fought to the death in the Q&A community. Isn’t it now one of the most important content contributors to the Mphone ecosystem? ?
What we have to do now is to make the product better and attract more users. Users will enjoy it as they please. "
David's words cruelly helped this group of entrepreneurs in the ivory tower to more clearly realize the facts that they knew but were unwilling to accept. Young people not many years older than them built an unbreakable ecological system.
Edward said: "I also heard about it when I was taking Internet-related elective courses. NewPay probably lowered its market share in order to avoid being sued by the federal court in the name of antitrust."
David agreed: "I have also heard similar statements. While other Internet companies are eager to say how high their market share is, NewPay's statistical caliber shows that their market share is only over 60%. This is Seriously inconsistent with the facts.
Later, our company found out how they did the statistics. They went to the city where NewPay had the lowest market share to do the statistics. "
Zuckerberg interrupted everyone's meaningless chat: "So we need to talk to NewPay. NewPay's service fee is relatively high, but we have no choice.
In addition, when we first started our business, we also considered which platform we would launch our application on. The result of the discussion was still Mphone, right?
Since we have all chosen Mphone, why should we worry about choosing NewPay? "
Why does Zuckerberg’s team not like Newman? It’s not that they don’t like Newman. They actually regard Newman as an entrepreneurial idol, but this mentality is contradictory. As a Harvard student, it is normal to have a natural antagonism towards Berkeley students. .
They hope to re-follow the successful path of Newman's entrepreneurial success and eventually create their own ecology. The word ecology has become a popular word in Internet entrepreneurship with several Mphone developer conferences.
When investment managers and entrepreneurs talk about long-term goals, they are building an ecosystem.
It’s frustrating when you want to build your own ecosystem but have to contribute to other people’s ecosystems.
Zuckerberg said: "The last question we have to discuss is what is our software called?"
"AChat?"
"MeetU?"
Everyone expressed their opinions, and almost all of them revolved around the two core elements of anonymity and chatting. They fell silent for a while, and no one could convince anyone.
Finally, Edward said: “I think it’s better to just call it FaceChat, or FC for short.
Although we are an anonymous social software, users who eventually have a spark of conversation will always have to move from anonymity to their true identity, from online to offline, and finally see the other person's face.
Calling FaceChat differentiates us from other anonymity software on the market. "
In the end, the name Face Chat was unanimously recognized by everyone and became their product name.
Zhou Xin learned from Li Jingyi that in this era Facebook has become Face Chat, and he couldn't help feeling that the changes he had brought about were too great.
Tencent does not make games, Alibaba does not make Taobao, and even Facebook has become Face Chat.
However, based on Zhou Xin’s understanding, Tencent will definitely not go back to making games, but it is hard to say whether Alibaba will go back to making Taobao. Just because you don’t do it for the time being doesn’t mean you won’t do it forever.
After the launch of Face Chat, starting from the Boston metropolitan area, it quickly became popular in college circles across the United States.
There are more than fifty schools in Boston. In addition to top universities such as Harvard and MIT, there are also secondary universities such as Northeastern University and Boston University. The large number of universities leads to a particularly large number of students here.
The software FaceChat is very similar to Soul in later generations. Users are anonymous, and then there is a square. The square is similar to a post bar. Everyone can post on the square, and then the official will guide the hot topics of the day.
When Zhou Xin experienced Face Chat, he lamented that Zuckerberg is indeed a top genius, and he can still make Face Chat without Facebook.
“This idea is also interesting. You can input your real information in the background and unlock a piece of real information after the number of conversations.
A truly genius idea. "After a brief experience, Zhou Xin sent an email to Warren Jensen of Emerging Investments, asking him to pay attention to this company and that Emerging Investments could invest in this project.
Yes, Zhou Xin didn’t invest in it at first because he didn’t think it was necessary. After all, without Facebook, he didn’t know how far Zuckerberg could achieve with an anonymous chat software, and he wasn’t interested.
Zhou Xin feels that it is almost enough to reach a valuation of several hundred million US dollars. After all, the valuation of POSTSecret is the ceiling for similar software.
After the experience, Zhou Xin changed his mind. He realized that entrepreneurs who can become top technology giants all have two skills. Even if they change the world line, their brilliance cannot be concealed.
FaceChat is a software that is simple to say the least. It is a simplified version of Soul, but it has added some very interesting functions, which is to unlock real information.
You can set a series of information such as your occupation, identity, name, city, etc. as unlockable conditions, including your personal photos.
Then set up a stepped unlocking method. For example, after sending ten messages to each other, you can unlock a message. The more messages you send, the more messages will be unlocked, until all the information you entered is unlocked.
It is equivalent to a process of gradually exploring the identity of the other party during the chat.
The number of unlocking messages here is fixed, and every 10 messages sent to each other is a step. However, the total number of personal information that can be unlocked is set by yourself, and the order before and after is also set by the individual.
This is full of creativity.
What makes Zhou Xin even more impressed is the profit model. The profit model of FaceChat is also very simple. Recharge as a member. After becoming a member, others need ten messages to unlock your personal information. You can get a discount. You only need the other party to reply eight messages. Here you go, you’re unlocked.
This profit model does not change the gameplay of the software, but also gives users the urge to pay.
The only problem is that the model of Face Chat is not easy to place ads. If you only rely on membership fees, the upper limit is limited. Therefore, Face Chat is definitely not as high-valued as Facebook in later generations, but the value is definitely there. In Amerikan's It is not a problem to enjoy a market value of tens of billions of dollars in the financial system.
Compared with Chinese Internet companies, the biggest advantage of Silicon Valley Internet companies is that they can operate unimpeded on a global scale. Once their business models are formed, they can be quickly harvested around the world.
This is true for Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook.
Face Chat gained 10,000 users in just one week. In half a month, the number became 100,000. It is growing at an unimaginable speed.
When the number became 100,000, in the small office rented by Zuckerberg and the others, five people were holding a simple celebration ceremony. Zuckerberg said: "It looks like we did a good job.
In two weeks, our number of users exceeded 100,000, of which the number of paid users exceeded 10,000, which means that it can now bring us US$100,000 in revenue every month, which is an astonishing number.
According to the person in charge of the Mphone App Store and I communicated privately, this ratio is very rare. It is one of the highest paid ratios among apps other than games since the Mphone app was launched.
Before we celebrate, we need to think about a new question, that is, should we introduce new investment institutions and quickly expand our market share, or should we rely on our own profits to expand slowly. "
Without Zhou Xin, there is no second answer to this question. It must be to quickly find venture capital, attract investment, quickly expand the scale, copy the successful model across the United States, and bloom more.
After Zhou Xin's success, entrepreneurs, especially those with stable profit models, do not want to introduce venture capital institutions too early, because this means that their equity will be diluted and their interests will be taken away by venture capital institutions. .
Zuckerberg also faces a similar problem. With Zhou Xin in front, he really wants to develop slowly by relying on stable revenue. However, because the success of Face Chat depends on product innovation and lacks a sufficient moat, he is afraid of being too slow. It was copied by other competitors and came from behind.
Zuckerberg continued: "We are currently doing $100,000 in revenue per month, and that number will grow as our user base grows.
At present, most of our revenue is invested in increasing hardware resources, because our number of users is growing faster than expected. I plan to double our number of employees within two weeks, which means We will hire five more people.
Then we move to a larger office, and the cash flow of $100,000 is not enough to support us to do so many things. "
(End of chapter)
