Similar to the urban legends that spread among Internet cafe owners after Luo Youyi and others returned to cities below the third and fourth tiers, there are many more.
Basically, the first batch of "Three Hundred Warriors of Internet Cafe Owners" who had enjoyed Gu Kun's treatment copied such legendary stories after returning home, stimulating local Internet cafes, game arcades, and even other less relevant small business owners to follow up crazily.
Ask Alipay's local promoters to come to your home to install it and join the online recharge and payment service.
Various franchised online game companies, led by Boss Bao’s Zhonglian Games, also provide the largest discount service for recharge point cards through the Alipay channel - such as a physical monthly card worth 30 yuan each, which was originally sold to newsstands/physical stores.
The cost is about twenty-seven or eighty yuan, and the bookstores at all levels above also keep a commission on the profits, so it is equivalent to 15% of the final selling price of the game point card. It is distributed to the channel dealers, and the channel dealers are willing to help you.
Bring some goods.
The biggest advantage of online shopping is that all middlemen are cut out. Alipay's refund staff directly contact the Internet cafe owners and clearly mark the prices and conditions for the Internet cafe owners: if you join Alipay now, you can get a discounted price of 25 yuan per point card.
Selling it to players is still 30 yuan, and the Internet cafe owner can earn 5 yuan for each card.
This is profit earned without having to spend extra on marketing costs. How can the Internet cafe owners not be jealous? Anyway, the network administrator only needs to sit there and turn on the machine, with a game advertisement for recharging on the back. People who want to play online games will naturally find an Internet cafe.
The boss helps to recharge.
Moreover, Alipay's local promoters also made it clear: Only by joining Alipay this year can you get a preferential price of 25 yuan for each point-of-sale card. If you survive the end of 2001, starting from New Year's Day 2002, if you want to join again, it will be 26 yuan.
If you come back after 2003, it will become 27 yuan. This is a typical early comer discount, early comer is a high v rhythm.
Those who follow up can see the curative effect, international recognition, and the crazy profits of their peers, so the speed of follow-up is naturally exaggerated.
As a result, Alipay's bottleneck for new users once changed from "the sales speed of local promoters" to "the installation speed of technical support staff."
Fortunately, such small problems can be easily solved. Ma Feng has Ahri's iron army to urgently train each local salesperson on some technical support-related network security technical knowledge, and it was solved in a few days——
Strictly speaking, today's "Alipay" is not the same thing as the Alipay that appeared three years later, but the name is similar. From a technical point of view, today's "Alipay" is closer to the legendary Shengda Company in history.
The legendary point card online sales platform was developed in the second half of 2002.
Therefore, with the network security technology of 2001, to ensure the absolute safety of the money stored in Alipay by Internet cafe owners and the absolute safety of the payment process, it would be impossible to use the "website to download a client for you" in 2004.
It is an open model that users can install if they want, but it must be closed and strengthen security access.
For every Internet cafe owner to install, Alipay staff with a USB-key that looks like a U-shield must come to authenticate and bind the physical mac address of the computer that the Internet cafe owner will use to make payments. These are the only additional conveniences.
Only by sacrificing sex can we gain the shortcomings of network security technology three years ahead of our time, preventing Alipay from falling into a wave of stolen accounts and collapse.
There is no need to elaborate on the technical details. In a nutshell, from late October to early November, in just half a month after the "Three Hundred Warriors of Internet Cafe Owners" returned to China, the number of Alipay users increased.
It far exceeds the previous growth rate in the 45 days (six weeks) before the product was launched! And it is more than double!
When the group launched in early October and announced that "Alipay users are exempt from financial review for visas to Lanzhou" and other information, the total number of Alipay users in China was 14,000, and it reached 20,000 around October 20, and by November 10
On that day, that is, after the dividends from the credit endorsement were fully released, this number reached 50,000!
You must know that Alipay today only has a "seller side" and no "buyer side", so these 50,000 users are not just ordinary people, but 50,000 merchants.
Fifty thousand consumers are nothing, but 50,000 store owners have a terrifying influence. There are three to four hundred prefecture-level cities and nearly three thousand counties in the country, with an average of twenty merchants in each county.
, has been able to cover the online entertainment industry to a considerable extent.
After all, there were not that many Internet cafes and game arcades across the country in 2001. The peak of the Internet cafe industry was probably after 2005. At that time, because World of Warcraft entered China, many players who originally bought computers at home could not drag their old machines.
World of Warcraft, so one game pushed the Internet cafe industry to its peak (more than ten years later, the Internet cafes that transformed into Internet cafes were almost destroyed. The industry continued to survive by eating chicken, but it was still incomparable to the scale of World of Warcraft back then.
)
In today's developed areas, there are only a few Internet cafes in each street, but in rural areas, there may not be even one in the entire township. Ma Feng estimates that by the beginning of 2002, all the B-end sellers and users in the country had been recruited, and more than a dozen of them had been recruited.
This is a limit of 10,000 yuan. Before Alipay’s use of payment services expands to new categories, this is already the ultimate bottleneck.
After all, point cards are virtual items and there is no logistics. Early e-commerce payment tools can only focus on virtual items. Others will have to wait for the logistics system of the entire society to develop and the supporting infrastructure to improve.
The reason why Dangdang.com is able to sell books now is also due to the fact that the value density of books is not bad, and it is not afraid of damage during the logistics process - the books sold online cost at least dozens of yuan each, and
After all, a book is just a thicker document that can be put directly in an envelope and mailed. The key to the value of a book lies in its content. The physical entity is only a carrier of its internal knowledge, so even if the cover is dirty and broken, you can still read it after wiping it.
Users won’t have to worry about returns.
Therefore, in the same way, the goods that can be sold online today and require physical logistics, in addition to books, are at most other audio-visual products, game CDs and even all content products that "the body is not important, the soul is important". Who wants other physical goods?
Any reborn person who dared to sell it in 2001 definitely didn’t have the foresight to risk the death of each one.
…
Ma Feng himself received the above-mentioned "Alipay" user growth report for the first time on the weekend after the "Three Hundred Warriors of Internet Cafe Owners" returned to China, exactly two weeks later.
This day is November 11, 2001, Sunday.
Employees at Ali Baba and Alipay's headquarters did not go to work. Only the local promotion team was running outside. Ma Feng was alone, drinking kung fu tea with Cai Chongxin, and Cai Chongxin helped him interpret the report.
After listening, Ma Feng sighed from the bottom of his heart: "Xiao Gu's skills are so good. Just relying on this kind of 'international recognition' allowed Alipay's early credit to expand so quickly, allowing him to take half of the shares in this new company."
, it’s not an exaggeration.”
Under normal circumstances, if he were to meet Gu Kun in person, he would definitely call him Mr. Gu, and he would occasionally call him Mr. Gu in front of outsiders. However, when chatting with Cai Chongxin behind closed doors in private, he would just call him Mr. Gu.
Forget it.
This is also an attempt to win over Cai Chongxin and show that he will not avoid him.
As for what he mentioned, "Gu Kun took away most of the equity in Alipay", this is also true. It was settled a few months ago when the new Alipay company was established. Based on the Ma Feng in 2001
With his strength, he didn't feel there was anything wrong with what Gu Kun did.
At that time, Gu Kun injected tens of millions of dollars in early investment into the new company Alipay. Subsequently, he bet that if the money was burned out and the performance grew well, he would make additional money and further increase his shareholding ratio. (Just now.
It is definitely not possible to take half of it directly when starting the angel round. It is based on the continuous capital injection and betting agreement, and it will be increased to more than half in the future. Because if you take half of it at the beginning, the people below will not even be motivated to work)
Gu Kun has put in so much effort, and he even had the idea to bring together Boss Bao of Zhonglian Games and Ahli Mafeng to do this. Shouldn't he get the big share?
Especially at this moment, history has proven that it is "international recognition" that has led to the huge increase in Alipay's gold content. The early promotion was so smooth, what else can't be convinced? Those are not ordinary financial investors, but serious investors with high quality.
Resource-based investors who operate traffic resources.
Money is the same all over the world, but the resources of the people behind the money are different.
After hearing Ma Feng's sentiments, Cai Chongxin agreed in principle with Ma Feng's sentiments. However, since he was in finance, he was more alert and sensitive in certain aspects. While agreeing, he also reminded Ma Feng:
"But according to the current trend, in three to five years, we don't know how Alipay will grow in the future. Now we have 50,000 to 60,000 Internet cafe owners who have prepaid tens of millions of online game point cards with us.
Top up money.
According to this trend, I'm afraid that if it develops to another order of magnitude, some peers will be jealous and think that we are absorbing savings in disguise. At that time, we will definitely find ways to standardize it. If the business really gets that big, we should spend resources on it.
You must keep an eye on the license plate and obtain it at any cost.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that Gu Ye's foreign investment status will have an impact on the company. Once a company changes from Internet services to financial attributes, foreign investment will be very difficult. You will have the opportunity to report to Gu Ye in the future.
When doing so, one should also make the ugly statement clear in advance. Whether he will give up his Lanfang nationality and join the Chinese nationality in the future, or find someone to hold it on his behalf, or whether he wants to cash out at a high position, is all a matter of opinion.
We definitely don’t want to drive him away. If he wants to cash out, as long as our business is good enough, we will definitely have to pay him back if he cashes out ten times or a hundred times his investment. He burned 200 million in five years, and if he does well, we will pay him back 20 billion.
So what, I’m afraid he still looks down upon these two tens of billions.”
When Cai Chongxin said this, his tone was also very sincere. He did not want to reduce Gu Kun's equity. He just considered that the company's development would get out of control and had to have a plan in advance.
In fact, in the history of another time and space, Alipay was spun off separately after Ali Baba was delisted from the Hong Kong stock market, and then Ali Baba went listed on Nasdaq. A large part of it was also due to regulatory pressure. Involving finance
In terms of attributes, foreigners are not allowed to hold large shares.
Although Gu Kun is an old friend of the Chinese people, it cannot be denied that he is essentially a "foreigner" like Sun Zhengyi.
Ma Feng couldn't help but ponder after hearing this: "I will find a way to deal with this matter. Mr. Gu is so loyal, we can't be untrustworthy. If it really gets to that point, it will be up to Mr. Gu to decide what he chooses. All we have to do is support him."