"Thank you for the invitation. I'm in Beijing. I just got off the plane. Although my arrival is very sudden, the brothers seem to welcome me. I will host this bi-weekly meeting."
Inside Doule's headquarters in Beijing, Gu Yun stood in the middle of the conference room with a smile and said with a microphone.
The average age of the employees of the short video company is surprisingly young. Coupled with a young boss, the company atmosphere is completely different from Jiangcheng. Everyone does not feel hierarchical at all and chats happily with Gu Yun.
call.
"Then let's talk, who should start first?"
As soon as Gu Yun finished speaking, Tu Weicheng, the head of Doule's product department, raised his hand and took the lead in speaking.
"Judging from the current situation in recent times, we have received more and more feedback from users that minors are overly obsessed with DouLe."
Tu Weicheng turned on the microphone in front of him and projected a video of a face-to-face interview on the big screen.
When DouLe was mentioned, the interviewer Lao Li couldn't help but sigh.
His child is seven years old and became obsessed with DouLe as soon as he entered first grade.
When I asked him to put down his cell phone and come to eat, the reply he got was always, "Wait a minute, I'll be there soon." Then he kept dawdling, and when he encountered something funny, he would giggle like "chuck".
I brush my teeth when I get home from school, brush them before going to bed at night, and brush them while eating. "It would be great if I could be so conscious about brushing my teeth," he said in the video.
This is indeed a problem faced by some parents today.
How to extricate yourself from being addicted to short videos?
"I have been worried about this matter," Lao Li told Doule's user interview team. During this summer vacation, children can hold their mobile phones and browse from morning to night.
He didn't want to be a strong parent, so he confiscated his cell phone.
I have tried tactful methods several times, such as reminding the child of the time while playing, or using retreat to advance, telling her that she is a little adult and needs to learn self-management, but the results are not ideal.
What parents are most worried about in the video is that their children have not yet fully developed the ability to think independently and are in a growth stage that loves to imitate, so they are easily affected by bad information in short videos.
"My cousin is 13 years old and is in the second grade of junior high school. Every day he watches videos of various luxury cars and houses, young ladies, and travel bloggers. Now he is shouting every day that he wants to start a business in the future."
In the center of the video, another user lamented.
According to reports from users, their children are addicted to TikTok. Some imitate the exaggerated movements in short videos, some squirm in front of the videos wearing heavy makeup, and some have joined dozens of advertising groups, part-time job groups, etc.
He happily interacted with various people every day, and even started a "business" reselling small toys.
Some parents discovered that their children were induced by friends on DouLe to download a chat app called Tanhua and transfer money to strangers.
At the end of the video, there is a statistical chart.
On the complaints filed on DouLe's backend, a search for the keyword "underage" yielded 822 results, most of which were related to minors mistakenly depositing DouCoins and rewarding anchors, with the highest amount reaching more than 100,000 yuan.
"Mr. Gu, I have raised this issue several times before, but with the crazy growth of data, everyone feels that it is not a big deal."
After Tu Weicheng finished speaking, some of the executives in the conference room began to pout.
Different positions naturally lead to different perspectives on issues.
Even in the same company, the thinking between products and markets, products and operations is so far apart that they cannot even understand each other.
Products may consider the impact of the software itself on users, while operations and marketing focus more on data growth. Don’t every product have this kind of detail?
Are there many children who are addicted to playing games, watching anime, and reading?
Doule has just embarked on its expansion territory. Is it really necessary to spend time and energy solving these small things?
As usual, if the issues at the biweekly meetings are not discussed by the boss, they will first be discussed by everyone, then each person will speak separately, and finally a solution will be voted on.
Tu Weicheng had already reflected on this issue at previous bi-weekly meetings, but most people present felt that he was making a mountain out of a molehill.
This time Gu Yun attended the regular meeting in person, and Tu Weicheng couldn't restrain himself anymore. In front of the big boss, he once again wanted to come up with a solution.
"Information addiction is a very big burden for adults, let alone minors."
Facing Gu Yun's gaze, Tu Weicheng explained to Gu Yun, "Mr. Gu, short videos need to frequently provide exciting stimulation points to the brain to ensure that the content is watched and has a spreading effect. Our brains react after seeing these stimulation points.
The response is not rest, but an enhanced working state."
He continued to introduce that the consequence of this is that when a person truly enters a resting state, the brain will have a cognitive disorder, making it difficult for people to obtain a large amount of information in a short period of time such as "study" or "work".
Investing more energy in stimulating things makes it easy to feel anxious, upset, or even distracted when studying or working.
"This will definitely have a negative impact on minors."
"Then the same goes for other software or games?"
The colleague next to me felt a little unhappy and said loudly.
In his eyes, biweekly meetings are like fighting a war. The first thing to solve is the offensive problem of frontline soldiers. Why study the placement of prisoners so early?
After hearing everyone's noise, Gu Yun made a palm-down gesture to signal everyone to stop speaking.
"This matter is indeed very important. Let's do it this way. The technical department will go back and launch an anti-addiction system for teenagers. We will use Doule as a pilot and add an additional interface to it."
The head of the technical department nodded and quickly recorded Gu Yun's thoughts in his notebook.
The anti-addiction system means that when you open the app, a reminder will pop up, prompting you to choose to set "teen mode" without logging in.
In this mode, users can only use it for no more than 40 minutes a day, and cannot use it from 22:00 to 6:00 the next morning.
At the same time, in terms of product settings, weighted recommendations for popular science and traditional culture content are provided with a simple interface.
Only the like function is left on the homepage. The "Friends" column on the bottom interface is replaced with "Discover". The discovery page is classified according to "Humanities and History", "Animal World", "Space Odyssey", etc.
For minors, social-related functions such as messaging, subscriptions, etc. are not available.
In fact, sometimes, a company still needs a slightly domineering leader.
Without Gu Yun's decisive decision, this issue would most likely have been slowly coordinated between the two departments, and it would have basically been declared aborted.
Until one day, the country made great efforts to rectify interviews and forcefully introduce rectification measures to solve the problem of adolescent addiction. At that time, it actually affected the brand image.
Since rectification is necessary anyway, it is better to use Doule as a pilot to take the first step, and maybe it will be established as a conscientious enterprise and benchmark.
"Mr. Gu, the work progress of our operations team is as follows, please look at the big screen."
Dai Yajun, the head of operations, opened his own ppt. Starting from the adjustment of key positions in Doule, every key indicator has been boosted.
Relying on operations to achieve growth is one of the typical characteristics of domestic Internet products.
In Western technology companies, the task of acquiring users usually belongs to marketing, sales or development teams, who tend to systematically achieve user growth through highly scalable data and technology methods.
The same goes for Doule's operations team, who are usually active throughout the day and maintain relationships with external stakeholders, including users, creators, and promotion partners.
The ppt is concise and clear, and Gu Yun can tell at a glance that Doule's daily activity has been growing at a high intensity almost every day in the past few months.
Behind this rapid growth, a great idea came to the head of operations Dai Yajun: college students from art schools.
Under her command, the Doule team went deep into art schools across the country to find good-looking students as its users.
In total, the team convinced hundreds of such students to join the platform and promised to help them become popular online.
Facts have proved that this method is very effective.
The influx of a large number of users helped the platform build an original content library and established a cool and fashionable tone for DouLe's popularity.
Because the majority of the team is young people, and knowing that young people are very concerned about their personal image online, Doule has established a dedicated programming team to create first-class beauty filters and special effects.
This lowers the threshold for content creation and gives users the confidence to shoot videos without makeup.
In mid-2013, a song called "mi mi mi" became popular on Douyue.
It is undeniable that this song from Russia is melodious, energetic and contagious.
However, it was the set of novel dance moves written and performed by Shen Qingcheng that paired with this song that made the song a popular video background music and dramatically amplified its success.
Since the beginning of the year, the result of these measures is that DouLe has topped the app store download rankings.
Various reports and data show that from the Spring Festival to the summer vacation for students, DouLe's daily active users easily increased by tens of millions, and the number of fans of some DouLe celebrities quadrupled.
With its huge user base, DouLe has officially begun to attract the attention of digital marketers.
In the eyes of some brands, DouLe, WeChat and Weibo are now “must compete” social media platforms for brands.
The "two giants" commonly known in the Internet marketing circle have quietly turned into the "three giants".
"After our summary, looking back at Doule's success, we can find that there are five reasons."
Doule team meetings are completely different from most ineffective and lengthy meetings. The main focus is an efficient iteration, solving problems, and allowing the team to summarize the rules and make progress.
This style of play has been applied in management as early as when Gu Yun first started his business, and it has always been successful.
As the leader of the operations team, Dai Yajun naturally has to summarize the effective rules and promote them to other middle offices.
“I think the first is infrastructure.
First of all, what we need to admit is that no matter what Doule did or did not do, just because it took the opportunity to start a business in the first year of 4G, Doule has more favorable conditions for success.
By 2013, fast, cheap, stable, and ubiquitous 4G networks had become widely popular in China.
Video-based mobile applications like DouLe can only be accepted by mainstream users after suitable network infrastructure is widely put in place.
In addition, other supporting technologies have been created that can greatly enhance the video viewing experience.
There are mainly four factors, namely high definition, music, special effects filters and personalized recommendations.
The second is support from the mothership.
Being able to be independent from the parent company while also having access to the parent company's professional technology, capital and infrastructure systems, and gaining huge benefits, is a good condition that most start-ups dream of.
The third is the recommendation algorithm.
In the past, the y team mistakenly believed that their application was a social network first, and therefore wasted a lot of time and energy.
With Doule, the original technology stack and supporting products of the Paradise Company can be said to be consistent with the true value of the content platform.
In content-based communities, content is more important than people.
The Paradise Group is full of experts and has a very powerful algorithm system that can even identify high-quality videos posted by unknown accounts and distribute them to a wide range of audiences.
DouLe and later TikTok both have a great appeal, that is, they give ordinary people a chance to become famous.
The fourth is positioning.
Doule has formulated a well-thought-out systematic strategy to expand the platform's content into various mid-tail and long-tail content market segments.
Travel, food, fashion, sports, games, pets, each category has rich and diverse content to satisfy everyone's tastes.
They have adopted many promotional activities, from signing up fashionable celebrities to attract young people to quickly accelerating content diversity and creating a platform more relevant to the mass market.
DouLe's original slogan was "Let worship start here - a music short video community focusing on the new generation."
After the beginning of the year, the slogan became simpler and more neutral, namely "recording a good life".
Finally, there is the business model.
Marketers quickly discovered that ads shot in a raw and less polished way could easily be mistaken for regular user-generated videos and fool people.
Otherwise they will immediately skip anything they think is an ad.
The easier it is to make money on Doule, the more effort people will put in to create high-quality content and build an active community.
Once an account gains a certain number of followers, creators can add e-commerce links to their videos to allow viewers to purchase goods, which opens up huge opportunities.
In the second half of the year, we plan to officially launch DouLe e-commerce so that creators can get positive feedback from sharing their lives."
Different from the questions raised by the product department, the work summary of each operation can always give people a bright feeling.
Not only do they do things beautifully, but they also speak beautifully.
Even Gu Yun, who was used to seeing strong winds and waves, became excited after hearing the report.
I’m afraid no one among the elites here knows what DouLe will look like in the future than he does.
Setting up a shopping interface and opening up DouLe live streaming e-commerce is undoubtedly the first step for this giant ship to officially set sail.
