In 2012, we prepared to get an angel investment for our start-up project. During due diligence, the investors were surprised at why we only spent less than 150,000 yuan of start-up capital in the previous year, but the number of users and customers was no less than that of the team that spent millions of yuan a year. It from a lesson during the dotcom bubble, when do is an education class website, in order to improve the popularity, like the rest of the site, a large amount of money offline activities, parties, often skating rink next weekend bag is a bar or a club for all registered users are free to play, is expected to bring more active users and popular website. But what were the results? It turns out that people sign up to play for free, and then they stop coming to our site, and very few people stay. Finally, we changed the measurement method and changed the number of registered users to the number of active users. The results showed that the cost of bringing each active user was more than 500 RMB through offline activities, which was obviously not cost-effective. Therefore, we reined in our work and focused on online products and operations, which achieved good results. Although offline activities were occasionally organized, they were mostly operational activities for active users to participate in and improve their sense of belonging.
Back in 2012 the startup project, in the poor force of year, I and my partners will carefully calculate each activity, the input-output ratio of each promotion, with a scoring system, make into one yuan can get is can figure out how many customers, so as to constantly adjust their strategy, adjust strategy is not in order to reduce the promotion cost, It’s about using promotional dollars more efficiently.
Recently, I feel less and less inclined to write articles. The reason is not that I have nothing to write about, but that I want to make fun of a lot of things. However, when I start to write, I suddenly realize that my god, this should be a truth that I can understand personally. And recently see some strange, let me feel a lot of truth is really not everyone understand. For example, when a startup spends money, I always assumed that all entrepreneurs would carefully measure and evaluate their marketing costs as we do, and that they might not even spend marketing money early in the project. But I have recently noticed that companies are spending as much money as they did during the bubble years of the early 2000s, pouring limited resources into so-called marketing campaigns that have no effect, and in terms of the results, it would be putting it mildly.
Speaking of burning cash, we have to mention a company called Crazy Cats and the rock concerts they organize. I know that this company is in a technical conference, and they attend the conference as a top sponsor. As far as I know, the Title of this top sponsor is at least several hundred thousand. I wonder what kind of company can do that, when people don’t really know what they do, and do that kind of sponsorship. So I went to the booth to chat with them, and found that they were engaged in cloud service. According to their words, it was a “real-time cloud”. I didn’t know much about the specific technical concept, but from the description of the other party, I didn’t feel optimistic about such service — it was too close to the customer’s core business, unless they wanted to achieve a quick Demo. Otherwise, it’s hard for companies to run their business on their platforms. Later, I read their website and documents, which further confirmed my idea. Different from cloud services such as storage and computing, this service aims to directly replace the real-time communication or messaging system of customers. In my understanding, such a system can be regarded as the nerve center. I don’t think many big companies would dare to entrust their technology to a cloud service system that is hard to replace and can only wait for a single point of failure. After thinking about it for a while, it seems that only toVC-style startups work well for demo programs.
Of course, the most interesting thing was that during our chat, I accidentally mentioned that their Logo with red letters on a white background was a bit abrupt and could not reflect the characteristics of the company’s business. As a result, I was speechless and replied, “Don’t you think this Logo is the most conspicuous one in all the booths today?” At this point, MY inner OS is that if you change the Logo into a piece of shit, it will be more conspicuous. It turned out that the VI system theory accumulated by various excellent designers for n years could not move the audience more than a “conspicuous”. At that time, I felt that I met a strange one and left speechless.
Then came the news of the Mad Cat Rock Festival, with its stylish venue, famous bands, catchy slogans and hashtags, and near-universal media coverage, all of which in any case looked like some of the money-wasting goofy things I did in the early 2000s. But unfortunately, the audience on the scene that day was far from reaching the “lively” level. Compared with the small audience, the huge venue was really embarrassing. I be familiar with the site, preliminary calculated area, stage, lighting, band, and a lot of media, the cost of this concert at least several million, and according to the data of 36 kr, is only the beginning of the company to more than 2000 investment, so I want to know in particular, more than 2000 investment isn’t going to have to burn like this? How much money does that leave for product and development? The whole feeling of Crazy Cat to me is that the company to attract attention regardless of means and cost, whether VI ideas or extravagant concert, all confirm this point.
Spell awareness, spell exposure times long past, with the exposure of money way too early work, so it is can’t understand the logic behind the burning money, so such a typical 2 b business, in particular, your client is the only enterprise, have a music festival, come and programmers can use up your service? And based on my 20 years of working with programmers, how do you know that programmers would be interested in participating in this type of activity? How many product managers sit on the sidelines at the Open Party after every geek Park convention, afraid to go in and play? Are programmers more likely to crowd than product managers? Branding may be true, but when a lot of people don’t know what your business is, it just makes mad Cat look like a music company (don’t laugh, I’ve been told that already). Whether it’s a cloud service or a 2B service, the most important thing is to polish your service, and the marketing approach should be around getting as many businesses as possible to learn about it, start testing it, and become your paying customers. It’s stupid to spend money on an ineffective promotion that doesn’t even communicate what you do. Please go back and calculate the input-output ratio and see how many actual customers you get for millions of dollars. The result is probably enough to flip the table for investors, if investors are in their right mind.
A counter example here, want to say, is the IP Gao Chunhui geography database, the same 2 b business, made less than two years, the input of resources just five people and hundreds of VPS monitoring stations, this year to now have had almost all the domestic listed Internet companies, and plunged the inside of the website 8, I didn’t open me higher concert, I did not see his high-profile show of feelings. Every time I saw him, I could see the 40-something entrepreneur sitting in front of the computer with the team updating IP data. The service that was polished in this way could not be trusted. Writing like this, there is no advertisement at all. Lao Gao is a well-known iron cock in the industry, and he will definitely not pay me, and the revenue of the team of five people this year is not the least bit higher than crazy Cat, I estimate.
In fact, there are many teams that spend money. Every day, we can see a lot of them, from apps that scan codes and deliver eggs to takeaways that make money by subsidizing meals. That’s not to say THAT I think all marketing spending is a waste of money, but don’t you think you should spend a lot of money on what you’re getting back? Is it efficient enough? Maybe you just want to take burned to the user and flow to melt the next round of money, believe me, capital may be following the trend, but is not a fool, such a play, eat jujube pills. The bursting of the bubble in the early 2000s was proof of that.
Recently with a lot of “net red” friends to talk about this problem, agreed that the advertising team should do some necessary screening, like crazy cat this kind of suicidal burning money of the company’s advertising really can not be accepted, say unfortunately, in case of yellow burning left a pile of customers, really affect their own image. As you know, DevLink is also organizing some technical conferences. For sponsors, there will be screening for companies whose budgets are far higher than their own capabilities. Sorry, we dare not accept this money. So far this month, we’ve turned down a couple of teams that wanted to sponsor, and we’ve offered almost free exposure to small teams that feel really good but don’t have enough money. It’s not for sentiment, it’s really for image, I don’t want to hear one day, look, the people who sponsor them are stupid rich people, and none of their products are valuable. I believe that sponsors and partners are part of the brand, and it is not worth it to throw everyone’s brand away for a little money.
Although the name of my public number is the top of the disorderly slot, but in all fairness from the beginning to write now ridicule the most ruthless is this article, it is estimated that this article will create a new low forwarding volume. But I don’t want to write about it, for no other reason than that it’s a shame that so much money is being squandered while so many reliable young people are worried about investing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You see this article out of the free Zhu Feng maintenance of the wechat public number: the top of the chaos slot, the main topic focused on entrepreneurship, hardware, IT technology, mainly teasing, occasionally sharing
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