Reborn: Billionaire in College

Can an App be brought back to life simply by adjusting the position of its logo?

Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?

But the funny thing is that this is the truth, even the original Musical.ly team themselves were surprised.

Although Musical.ly had a clear user positioning and good creativity, it maintained slow growth after its launch, which even made the team nervous at one point because the growth did not meet expectations. It was also because of this that they were unable to obtain financing.

The Musical.ly team analyzed the issue over and over again but still couldn't find the cause.

At one point they even doubted whether there was something wrong with their products.

So...

Under an inconspicuous opportunity, the Musical.ly team made a key design adjustment: repositioning the logo in the video to ensure that the Musical.ly logo would not be cropped when users shared the video.

This small adjustment unexpectedly greatly increased brand exposure and quickly promoted the spread of the app. Zhu Jun and his team were very surprised because they did not foresee that this fine-tuning of the design would bring such a huge effect. This was also the beginning of Zhu Jun's shift of the app's focus from education to entertainment.

It’s a pity that, at this timeline, Zhu Jun and Lu Yu have no way to solve the mystery themselves.

Just two months after the logo position was adjusted, Musical.ly topped the iTunes App Store in terms of downloads and was called the first Chinese social media application to become popular in the United States.

Since then, Musical.ly has never fallen out of the top 40 of all iTunes applications, becoming a "miracle" of Chinese software going overseas.

The excellent data enabled Musical.ly to successfully obtain three rounds of financing, namely US$500 million, US$1700 million, and US$1.2 million.

Finally, two years later, Musical.ly encountered a growth bottleneck, and its brand image was gradually positioned as a "youth application", making it difficult to attract users of other age groups. At the same time, when the company tried to return to the Chinese market to launch the Chinese version of Muse, it missed the best opportunity, and emerging local brands such as Kuaishou and Douyin began to occupy the market. Faced with the anxiety of growth, Musical.ly began to consider selling.

In November 2017, after half a year of intense negotiations, Musical.ly was acquired by ByteDance.

The above is the short-lived history of Musical.ly.

But no matter what, Musical.ly cannot be called a failed company, and Zhu Jun and Lu Yu have also proved their abilities.

This is why Chen Pingjiang was willing to keep them.

Let’s get back to the topic.

After hearing what Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo said, Zhu Jun and Lu Yu felt as uncomfortable as if they had eaten shit.

They hope that Chen Pingjiang's views are wrong, so that they can at least feel better and not feel so stupid. But at the same time, they also hope that Chen Pingjiang is right, so that Musical.ly or TikTok can quickly gain a foothold in the North American and even global markets.

In the second half of the meeting, the two could hardly listen, their minds were full of thoughts.

After the meeting was finally over, Zhu Jun took Lu Yu and walked quickly to the smoking room.

"Do you think they are right?"

Lu Yu shook his head and rubbed his lifeless eyes. "I don't know. I'm very confused right now. This feeling is terrible. It's like the last big question in a math test that you can't answer after thinking hard, and then someone gives you some pointers after you leave the exam room. In the end, you suddenly realize the answer and feel regretful. It's also like buying scratch tickets at a lottery station, buying all the tickets in the store, but only one is taken away, and that one happens to be a million-dollar jackpot."

Zhu Jun laughed: "Your description is very apt. My thinking is much simpler. First of all, is changing the logo positioning a solution? Secondly, what effect can be achieved after the modification?"

Lu Yu spread his hands helplessly: "No matter what, we are like standing in front of a mountain of treasures and returning empty-handed."

After saying this, the two fell into a long silence.

because……

If they had known earlier and made the changes earlier, they would have had enough confidence to reject ByteDance's acquisition, successfully raise money, and then grow the company.

But now, everything is too late, and my body has been sold.

…………

At this time, Chen Pingjiang, the instigator, was leisurely fiddling with the newly bought bonsai in the office, constantly pruning it according to his own wishes.

In his previous life, Chen Pingjiang saw the big guys doing this on TV and thought it was a bit pretentious.

Now I understand. Work is intense and stressful, so you need some hobbies to relieve stress.

It's not a good idea to play ball, raise birds, or walk the dog openly in the company. You still have to retain some mystery as the boss.

As a result, bonsai became one of my few hobbies.

"Has the issue with the Film Company Association been resolved?" Chen Pingjiang asked while stretching out the scissors in his hand and cutting off a crooked branch.

Zhao Shaoyang, who was sitting upright, nodded quickly and complained: "Don't mention it. I didn't have a good New Year. I had to visit them from the second day to the fifteenth day of the New Year, and apologized everywhere before I could deal with them. We gave them enough face and with the strength and background of our group, these people can just shout at us. If we really ask them to resist, I guess they won't dare to do it."

Chen Pingjiang smiled and asked, "What do you mean?"

"Hehe, that's even a question. The combined number of views of 'Ex-Files 2' on the two platforms has exceeded 400 million. It has a wide reach and appeals to all age groups. Not only has it received rave reviews from users, but everyone from the director to the stars has benefited from it. With its popularity skyrocketing, traffic and revenue have increased across the board. They can't afford to offend us."

"Ex-Files" has retired from the big screen and moved to mobile phones and computers. In addition to the huge benefits of Douyin and Qvod, the director and the stars have also benefited a lot.

After all, there is a threshold to go to the cinema, but there is no threshold to use mobile phones at home, which indirectly increases the influence of celebrities.

As a result, a strange atmosphere emerged in the market.

The theaters are clamoring, but the film production and distribution companies, brokerage companies, directors and stars themselves dare not express their support openly, but they have received many invitations for cooperation privately.

They dare not say anything because they don't want to offend the theater chain, but who doesn't want tangible benefits?

As a result, the theaters also backed down.

Taking advantage of the opportunity when Zhao Shaoyang came to visit, he took advantage of the situation.

They didn't want to fall out with Renren Films or even Chen Pingjiang behind it, thus forcing Chen Pingjiang to go down a dead end and dig up their ancestors' graves. They didn't want to make the film production and distribution companies, agencies, directors and stars uneasy, and they were eager to cool down the topic as soon as possible.

Zhao Shaoyang sighed: "After being in this industry for a long time, I realized that strength is still the most important thing. Just like variety shows and TV dramas, they could only be broadcast on TV stations in the past, and TV stations acted like masters. Now that there are more channels for online broadcasting, the attitude of TV stations has changed. The big screen may be the same in the future."

Wan Yuqian, who had been sitting next to him without saying a word for a long time, looked at Zhao Shaoyang's excitement and shook her head: "Don't get excited, there won't be a next time for now, it's not enough trouble." After saying that, she turned her head and looked at Chen Pingjiang: "But you, you won again."

In front of the friendly people, Chen Pingjiang smiled and acted like he deserved a beating: "I don't feel the sense of winning anymore."

Wan Yuqian said, "According to the process, I'll report to you. The data here includes the Douyin part. During the seven-day Spring Festival holiday, the total number of views exceeded 6 million times, of which more than 4 million times on the first day of the Lunar New Year, and the total number of viewers exceeded 1.8 million, with an average of about 3.3 times per user. Of course, to be precise, some viewers must have only watched it once, or even didn't finish it once, while some viewers watched it over and over again for three days, which is also normal."

"This set of data far exceeds the status of theatrical blockbusters. As for the so-called profit, the profit from movie tickets can be made from interstitial advertising, or even more. Here is another set of figures. In the first three days of the Spring Festival, the total number of moviegoers in offline theaters across the country was 7378.1 million. The number of online viewers of "Ex-Files" in just three days reached 1.8 million, far exceeding the offline viewing data."

"The so-called 1.8 million users actually watched it on the big screen with their families. In other words, the number of people who watched "Ex-Files" in three days must be greater than 3 million users. User feedback is almost entirely positive, with more than 1.8 comments on the film."

"For the movie "Ex-Files", there are several main benefits. First, the quality of cinema blockbusters is much higher than that of online movies, which makes it almost instantly beat all existing movies on online platforms after it is released for free. Moreover, even online movies are not free. Second, compared with the past when only VIPs could see these blockbusters that were released after the theaters were released and then played on online platforms, "Ex-Files" has made a start, and no matter whether it is a good start or a bad start, at least it will be recorded in the history of Chinese cinema. Third, with the successful experience of this time, we at Renren Film and Television have a sense of transcendence in the film industry."

Seeing Wan Yuqian finished speaking, Zhao Shaoyang reminded her, "Boss, this time Jinyi, Dadi, Pacific and other theaters all have a stake, but Wanda didn't rush to express its position due to Wang Cong's intervention. I'm sure you know his purpose..."

Chen Pingjiang rolled his eyes in annoyance: "This young master Wang is really troublesome. He is obviously not cut out for business, but he always wants to be a second-generation entrepreneur."

Zhao Shaoyang laughed dryly and said nothing more. It was really hard to refute what he said.

Is an Internet company suitable for entrepreneurship? Obviously not!

The only thing people remember about him is that he frequently changed girlfriends, and most of his girlfriends looked the same. Apart from that, he also lost 200 million yuan because of a slap in the face.

They were able to deal with each other in the past because Chen Pingjiang was not very powerful, but now the gap is as huge as heaven and earth.

Even his father was not good enough, let alone him?
"I heard that you are going to release two movies this year, right, 'Charlotte's Troubles' and 'Wolf Warriors'?"

Zhao Shaoyang nodded: "They are all low-budget movies. "Charlotte's Troubles" was made by Happy Twist, which I acquired before. Their company mainly made comedy sketches before, and this is their first movie. "Wolf Warrior" was written and directed by Wu Jing, and it will be released in May."

The projects for these two films were approved last year, and Wolf Warrior was even halfway through filming. Chen Pingjiang had also learned about it before.

All in all, neither of these two movies will lose money, and they can even make a lot of money. (End of this chapter)