The new round of fun staging financing will not only continue to strengthen the existing campus staging business, but also expand new business, that is, fun staging will move from school to off-campus and from students to white-collar workers. This is only a small step in the future, and more services for vertical people will be launched.
The fun stage was launched on March 2004 at 2065438+2 1. It has grown rapidly in the past six months. As early as April, it received a multi-million-dollar Series A investment from Lanchi Venture Capital, and in August, it received joint capital injection from source capital, Singapore private consortium and Lanchi Venture Capital.
Luo Min, the founder of Fun Stages, is a serial entrepreneur. I started my own business in 2005, started my second business in 2007, and joined the founding team of Haolemai on 20 10 three times. However, it was not until Fun Stage was founded that Luo Min's career reached a new peak and developed at an amazing speed.
Little known is that Luo Min once wanted to make a PC version of the box lunch selling platform, and Luo Min and his partners also sold box lunches on the street for several months to promote their business, but both ended in fiasco. When interviewed by Tencent Technology a few days ago, Luo Min did not shy away from this experience and frustration.
Luo Min said that his idea of selling bento was earlier than today's US group take-out. Are you hungry? But it failed at first because the latter grabbed the time point and accompanied the rapid rise of the mobile Internet. Therefore, starting a business needs to find a time point, and we must find a good track.
Lose face and hand out leaflets in the street.
The interesting staging mode is simply that the platform is connected with e-commerce, and the other end is connected with people who invest in wealth management. Students issue loan purchase targets at an interesting stage, and investors choose borrowers to borrow money from each other.
After the loan target is fully invested, the students spend the money and then repay the principal and interest to the borrower on a monthly basis. The personal information and purchase demand of borrowing students can be seen at a glance on the platform. The interesting staging mode is very competitive, but the interesting staging mode is relatively ahead.
There are several factors that can lead the market at different stages:
On the one hand, the team has accumulated long-term campus management. Haolemai only built tens of thousands of campus agents in colleges and universities at the beginning. When the monthly sales volume is the highest, it can reach 30 million. Li Shubin, CEO of Haolebu, said, "Luo Min's ability to manage campus channels has long been practiced."
Luo Min told Tencent Technology that the campus market can be done well, and the experience of buying music is part of it. In 2005, I started my own business as a campus SNS, also to develop campus ambassadors and promote the campus. Many founding teams followed him 10 years.
Another reason for the rapid development of fun staging is that the financial market is large, and there is no Internet giant in this industry. Competition is not as bloody as the group buying market. There are dozens of companies doing it, but small players can't get the money, which restricts further development.
However, the fun stage can grow, and the deeper level is more grounded. This team can sink down and do things. Before April this year, most people, including Luo Min, were distributing leaflets, tweets and online products everywhere, and all these were discussed by the team.
For many internet entrepreneurs, going to school to distribute leaflets every day, or going to the streets to distribute leaflets, will have a lot of uncomfortable feelings, depressed mood, and may also encounter the eyes of people around them. It is difficult for entrepreneurs to overcome this obstacle psychologically.
"Now you let Ma Yun (Weibo) try to hand out leaflets. He can deliver it for a day, but if you ask him to deliver it for a month, he will never be able to do it. People will be different at a specific time. " Luo Min said, "At that time, I did everything alone, because the team was very small and had to go through such a process."
It's a bit like Luo Min and his partner selling box lunches in the street, but also to promote his platform and the same persistence. The difference is that the business of selling box lunch failed, but the interesting staging suddenly caught fire in the market.
At present, a new round of financing is needed at the interesting stage because the capital market may go down and ammunition needs to be accumulated in advance. However, fun staging has a basic market in the college student market, with 300 cities and 2,500 colleges and universities, which needs to expand new vertical segmentation areas.
Nowadays, Fun launches new websites by stages and white-collar market by stages. Future phased projects are only the first step of interesting phased new business. In the future, the business line will expand rapidly on a large scale.
So, what is the business logic of interesting staging?
To some extent, this is economies of scale. For example, if you cooperate with Apple to sell mobile phones, the Apple family will sell 1 100 million, and all the fun stages will be divided.
For another example, when a user purchases a vehicle, the down payment for a 200,000 car needs 30%, and the other 70% needs a bank loan. After the down payment is completed, the user has to pay 8000 yuan of insurance and 16000 yuan of purchase tax, which is equivalent to 25000 yuan of other expenses.
The business logic of Fun Staging is that it may cost a user 8000 yuan to find an insurance company, but these businesses are packaged together and entrusted to Fun Staging, so Fun Staging can have bargaining power with insurance companies. For example, if there are 10,000 interesting installments, the insurance company may give the interesting installment 7,000 yuan, and the interesting installment can also charge users a very low rate. In this way, you can make money on goods by stages.
Luo Min said that if the gross profit of interest installment can be above 10% and the volume is as large as that of JD.COM, the service fee can be reduced to a very low level, so that users can basically use the interest loan from bank deposits to buy a car, and the interest installment will also have greater bargaining power with Apple and insurance companies.
It has already cost investors 2 million.
Before deciding to do fun staging projects, Luo Min saw dozens of projects, ranging from car group buying, online education to smart devices. It took him more than a year to come up with this interesting staging model. In this process, Luo Min has found five angel investors.
In the previous entrepreneurial attempt, some money was also lost, including 2 million yuan invested by Bao, the founder and angel investor of Lianzhong, and his friends. Fortunately, with the support of other investors, Luo found an interesting staging model after more than a year's support.
This is also a painful period of business failure. Talking about the feelings at that time, Luo Min said that the team was given three years, and if they couldn't do it for three years, they would continue to work. "If you don't give yourself three years, you will regret it."
The loneliness of this kind of entrepreneurship lies in that entrepreneurship is always making products, giving up products and then making new products. Even a product worked hard for 2 months and was cut off as soon as it went online. Many times, entrepreneurs are at a loss.
For Luo Min, who is in his thirties, starting a business has another challenge. It is also because he did not realize financial freedom when he started his business and bought a house. However, he bought a car and a small apartment, but he had to pay back the loan. He is burdened with family pressure, so it is easier to choose to be a corporate executive.
However, Luo Min believes that it is more difficult to achieve financial freedom in starting a business, and Chen Hua (Weibo) did not achieve financial freedom when starting a business. "Everyone doesn't have that much money. It is precisely because there is no money and no way out that we will go forward on the road of entrepreneurship. "
So, what is the best stage of starting a business?
Luo Min believes that the best period should have two periods. First, an entrepreneur is a blank sheet of paper, just like Yu Jiawen, the overbearing president of the post-90s generation, who started his business just after graduation or college. Anyway, it doesn't matter if he is used to living a hard life. It's 500 yuan and 800 yuan a month. It is precisely because he has never spent money, so at that time, entrepreneurs can eat whatever they want, and then they can be "willful."
In the second stage, entrepreneurs reach a certain level in the enterprise, above the director and VP, and have some experience before starting a business.
Today's interesting stages have experienced the most bitter days and are growing rapidly. However, this time is often the most dangerous time for enterprises. Luo Min once personally experienced that his old club, Haobu, fell into silence after its glory, and learned a lot from it.
So, how did the interesting stage move from the rough stage to the formal stage? There is no doubt that Ali, JD.COM and Haolemai have given interesting stages a lot of inspiration. Luo Min said that nowadays, fun installment financing is much more than Haolebu, but it is also jittery.
The reason is that it took only 8 months to achieve 1 month sales of 300 million, fearing that the team would not grow fast enough. It is very important for the company to achieve 2 billion sales next year 1 month, whether the team can grow rapidly and whether there are enough outstanding people to join.
"If the growth of the team can't keep up, the company's business won't dare to do it so fast, otherwise it will get out of control." Luo Min said that so many people and so many troops should have unified values. It took 15 years for Alibaba to develop today.
This allows us to spend 70% of our time looking for people, learn the management of Ma Yun and Liu (Weibo), and issue options to employees earlier. Many key employees signed complete agreements on the first day, and Luo Min even claimed to share 35% of the options with employees.
Why are you doing this? That is to recruit more talents for fun. Luo Min said, "Everyone works for two purposes. The first thing is to be happy at work, not angry. The second is to make money, so that everyone has a sense of trust and security. This is the goal we have been achieving. "