Dear friends, have you ever bought a hair dryer that breathes fire? Have you ever seen a super-spinning "Murder Husband" brand razor? Or an eighty-dollar digital camera? I believe many readers have guessed who I am talking about, that’s right! Today’s topic is Pinduoduo, an e-commerce platform that claims to be used by 300 million people. In the second half of 2018, it was responsible for the laughter of 1 billion Chinese people. In fact, most people only know the surface about Pinduoduo.

On July 26, Pinduoduo was listed on Nasdaq, with a market value of about US$30 billion, amid doubts or wait-and-see views from the outside world. It took Alibaba and JD.com more than 15 years from start-up to listing, while Pinduoduo only took 3 years. In three years, Pinduoduo has reached 300 million users and is now the third largest e-commerce platform in China. At the same time, Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, has a higher personal wealth than Liu Qiangdong, the founder of JD.com, due to his high personal shareholding ratio.

Many people are wondering why Pinduoduo has achieved such great success in such a short period of time. What tricks or unique marketing techniques does it have? Interesting soul, talking about technology and humanities, I am Li Ziran, so in this issue we will talk about Pinduoduo. ?

Pinduoduo’s team is particularly impressive, starting with its founder Huang Zheng.

This person is a genuine super academic. He was recommended to famous schools all the way during his studies, and the company he interned at was also a well-known large company. In such a background that is far beyond ordinary people, he naturally has quite high qualities. What's really great is his investor team, which is full of big guys and is famous all over the world. For example, Sun Tongyu, the first CEO of Taobao, was responsible for the rise of Taobao. This person is particularly good at using the low-price model to occupy the market. In the early days, Taobao also used low prices and miscellaneous products to win. In addition, Sun Tongyu is also skilled in using some barbaric growth methods. Old Taobao users may know that if you click on some messy websites, more than a dozen Taobao windows will pop up. In fact, these are all done by Brother Sun. In the later period, Taobao abandoned the low-end marketing route and devoted itself to platform standardization and brand upgrade. Sun Tongyu was relieved of his power by Jack Ma. We can see the early Taobao routine from Pinduoduo’s current state.

Duan Yongping, another big shot in Pinduoduo’s investor team.

At first glance, ordinary people are confused when they hear this name, but when it comes to Little Overlord and Backgammon, I believe everyone is quite familiar with it. Duan Yongping is the founder of these two brands, and the popular Little Overlord is his masterpiece. Later, Duan Yongping focused on investment and invested in a series of companies such as NetEase, which was also quite powerful. Rumor has it that Duan Yongping has four apprentices, namely: the boss of OPPO, the boss of VIVO, the CEO of BBK, and now Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, which is really impressive. When Huang Zheng was studying in the United States for his master's degree, he lived very close to Duan Yongping. The two were alumni. In addition, Huang Zheng was really talented and was deeply appreciated by Duan Yongping. As we all know, Buffett auctions off a charity dinner every year. Duan Yongping bought a seat to have lunch with Buffett for US$620,000 in his early years. Duan Yongping took Huang Zheng to attend this extremely valuable meal. At that time, Huang Zheng was only 26 years old. At the age of 26, ordinary people may still be taking various domestic "talent certificates" at the age of 26, but they are already eating at the same table as Buffett, which makes people sigh.

Another big player in Pinduoduo’s investor team is Ding Lei, known as “Ding Sanshi” to many NetEase game players.

Ding Lei is the founder of NetEase and was the richest man in China for a while. Brother Sanshi is particularly good at making products and operating games. NetEase's large-scale PC game "Fantasy Westward Journey" has 250 million registered users, with the highest number of online users reaching 2.71 million. In addition, "Tianxia 3", "Datang Warriors Zero", "Martial Spirits" 2》 "A Chinese Ghost Story 2" and other high-quality client games are all highly popular online games in China. In June 2016, the 3D Japanese-style turn-based RPG mobile game "Onmyoji" independently developed by NetEase was launched for Android first beta, and it detonated the entire mobile game market in just a few days.

The last big boss in Pinduoduo’s investor team is Wang Wei, the founder of SF Express.

To be an e-commerce company, you definitely need someone who knows a lot about logistics. There is no doubt that the person who “knows it best” is none other than Wang Wei. I believe he also played a big role in Pinduoduo’s growth. Wang Wei and Ma Yun had a good relationship. Ma Yun once visited Wang Wei in the thatched cottage, but Wang Wei didn't see him. Later, Wang Wei came to Ma Yun for something, but Ma Yun also turned the door down. The two each set up their own logistics company, and the two sides fought to the death. Wang Wei had the idea to start an e-commerce business, so he naturally chose to support an e-commerce platform like Pinduoduo to compete with Jack Ma instead of steaming steamed buns.

After a brief peek at Pinduoduo’s investor team, we clearly understand: Huang Zheng never fights alone, and this is not a battle that belongs to Pinduoduo alone. Judging from the list of investors alone, Huang Zheng has opened several galaxies of distance from other entrepreneurs.

The second and most important reason for Pinduoduo’s success is that it has chosen its market well.

In the past two years, there has been a popular word in the Internet venture capital circle - consumption upgrade. It is assumed that in the future, residents’ living standards will improve, and the so-called emerging middle-class consumers will generally pursue higher quality, better experience, and healthier lives. Based on this user demand, many entrepreneurs will be attracted to engage in entertainment and food production. , fitness, unmanned KTV and high-quality rentals, etc. Many people who have lived in first-tier cities for a long time will think that the people around them are highly educated and have pretty good spending power, but the truth may not be the case.

Not long ago, Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan, said that in fact, currently, the number of people with bachelor’s degrees only accounts for 4% of the country’s population; some friends from Sequoia Capital also posted on WeChat Moments that there are now more than 7% of the population in China. Hundreds of millions of people do not have credit cards, and more than 1.2 billion people do not have passports. Against such a “cruel data background,” Pinduoduo went against the grain of others and targeted markets outside the so-called fifth ring road—third- and fourth-tier cities, and even rural areas. This is actually a very huge consumer market. If you go deep into it, you can get feedback that far exceeds that of the high-end consumer market. Some Internet friends told me that while everyone is upgrading consumption, Pinduoduo is downgrading consumption. In my humble opinion, I don’t think Pinduoduo is a consumption downgrade. For example, some elderly people are new to smartphones and have just learned to use WeChat. For them, they have never upgraded, and naturally they cannot talk about downgrading.

In addition, there are some users who have indeed bought things on Pinduoduo that they could not buy before, and they also think it is a good deal. From this perspective, it's not really a downgrade.

If a luxurious investor team and correct market selection have laid a good foundation for Pinduoduo’s success, then the three points analyzed below are three indispensable factors in Pinduoduo’s development process. key factors.

As the largest instant messaging app in China, WeChat has more than 1 billion users. These 1 billion users themselves contain huge traffic dividends. Pinduoduo adopts a group-building model to allow users to bring their relatives and friends to its platform. Since then, it has acquired geometric multiple users at a particularly low price, and has grown rapidly using traffic dividends.

Tencent is also one of Pinduoduo’s investors. Before investing in Pinduoduo, Tencent also invested in JD.com, but JD.com’s use of WeChat is much weaker than the former. The latter's cooperation model with WeChat is limited to advertising in WeChat, while Pinduoduo directly uses WeChat's friend relationships to engage in recruiting people in WeChat, which makes the utilization of WeChat extremely high. This cooperation model is also beneficial to WeChat. Mutual benefit and win-win are recognized as the best cooperation model in the business community, so it has received strong support from Tencent.

Many people want to refute when they see Taobao. As mentioned above, Taobao is a competitor. How come it has become a key factor in success? In fact, Taobao is a bit of a helper here.

We already know that Taobao also started by selling low-priced goods and brand-name goods in the early days. However, after it started to develop, it wanted to enter a more mainstream consumer market, so it began to upgrade its brand. It also wanted to promote its own Tmall brand, so it began to be a bit excluded. For small and medium-sized businesses, the cost of staying on Taobao for these small and medium-sized businesses is getting higher and higher, making life more and more difficult; on the other hand, for a large number of consumers who want to buy bargains, Pinduoduo has opened an outlet for their huge demands. . Once Pinduoduo was launched, small and medium-sized sellers and manufacturers of brand-name goods saw hope again, and consumers also found a platform to buy bargains.

It can be said that they hit it off in several aspects, and the inner voice of small and medium-sized businesses is: There is no need to keep the boss here, there is a place for the boss! So Pinduoduo just happened to steadily catch the traffic pushed out from Taobao. Therefore, Taobao has more or less unintentionally made Pinduoduo what it is today.

Before founding Pinduoduo, Huang Zheng was actually a game company, and he was making so-called pornographic games, or soft pornographic games, which were just side projects. They can best understand the most fundamental needs of users and know how to retain users. Pinduoduo now also has some gamification settings, such as Duoduo Orchard. The ultimate goal is to allow users to keep coming back and play Pinduoduo. When Huang Zheng spoke some time ago, he said that the core of Pinduoduo is not to be cheap, but to satisfy users’ feeling of taking advantage. This sentence shows that this is a team with a very deep understanding of human nature.

The word "smooth sailing" does not exist in the business world, so will Pinduoduo have any crises or problems in the future? I think there may be three main points.

Yes, you read that right, Pinduoduo continues to lose money. After more than three years of business, Pinduoduo has accumulated losses of more than 1.3 billion yuan. However, loss itself is not a problem, because both Amazon and JD.com have experienced long-term and large-scale losses. But we must understand one thing: losses are often meant to build a moat. This moat can be channels, logistics, user loyalty, user consumption habits, or supply chain, etc. But at present, Pinduoduo’s moat is not particularly obvious. For example, Pinduoduo users, most of them are cheap users. Although it is easy for these consumers to come, their loyalty is extremely low. One day, once other platforms offer lower prices or use higher subsidies, these users will I must wave my sleeves and turn around and leave without taking away a single cloud. In other respects, Pinduoduo is not particularly strong. It is like a castle suspended in the air with steel bars. Once the steel bars break, it will fall and shatter.

Pinduoduo is currently developing well, but it may face encirclement and suppression from many parties. Pinduoduo has not yet been listed on the market, which is not enough to arouse high vigilance from opponents. Now that Pinduoduo has reached this level, it instantly expands like a water-filled sponge, becoming an opponent that no one can ignore. For Pinduoduo, Taobao launched the Taobao Special Edition, and JD.com and Suning also launched JD.com and Suning.com. What’s interesting is that Suning’s slogan is: Buy genuine products from Suning. At first glance, you can tell that it is Special customized for Pinduoduo. Therefore, it is still unclear whether Pinduoduo can maintain its first-mover advantage in this increasingly dangerous and fierce competition.

After all, Pinduoduo is a company listed in the United States. It is difficult to say whether its business model can be recognized in the United States.

First of all, the United States does not have so many off-brand products. It is not like China where there are so many small manufacturers that produce these off-brand products in large quantities.

Secondly, American consumers do not have the habit of consuming off-brand products. They often recognize brands. For example, when buying clothes, they may buy from brands they know and will not consider them because they are cheap. Other brands. Another point is that the logistics in the United States is very underdeveloped (I must say here that Chinese logistics is really NB), and it is difficult to implement the low-price and free shipping model. Under this premise, I think it is very difficult for Pinduoduo’s business model to be internationalized.

Finally, after all, Pinduoduo is an American listed company, and its main investors are also in the United States. If the United States does not have a similar business model, will they choose to understand when Pinduoduo has problems? support? Or like most consumers, it’s too late to wave goodbye? These are all unknowns.

But Pinduoduo is a very young company after all, and it is remarkable to be able to achieve this level. These problems are not without solutions. Many companies and enterprises have faced various problems in their initial stages. Some will surely fall, but those who overcome the difficulties and survive will become strong. Here, I also wish that Pinduoduo will get better and better in the future, become more standardized, and most importantly, can bring more affordable consumption choices to everyone.