I am not a literary giant

Zuo Ziliang said, "This month, so far, our app has seen 32 new users, a year-on-year increase of 450%. Do you know what that means?"

Wang Zixu gently shook his head. Zuo Ziliang dragged the whiteboard next to him over and pointed to the line graph at the top:

"When I first contacted you, our app had a total of over 3 users. After more than two months of hard work, it slowly grew to 5. And then, in this past month..."

His fingers made a sharp pulling motion along the line graph.

"Our user base jumped to 9.2 in one go. What does that mean? It means that in just one month, our app's new downloads were nearly 10 times our original user base, and this month's user growth equals all the growth our app has achieved since its inception!"

Prince Xu clenched his knuckles: "Is it because of the Little Prince?"

"Basically, yes," Zuo Ziliang said.

Prince Xu said, "Isn't this a good thing?"

Zuo Ziliang sighed: "It's a good thing, but we were blindly optimistic before. After the initial boom, we started to expand, increase bandwidth, expand server capacity, recruit on a large scale, and invest heavily in advertising... But, the 7-day retention rate of our initial batch of new users was only 6%..."

Prince Xu didn't understand the specific meaning of the number and asked, "What should it be?"

Zuo Ziliang said, "Let's put it this way: if we can achieve a retention rate of 15%, all our investments can be recouped, and next month's net profit can conservatively increase by more than 300%, and it can continue to grow. But with a retention rate of 6%... we'll still be in debt."

The prince asked humbly, "Will you owe money this month, or next month?"

Zuo Ziliang and Ye Lan exchanged a glance: "If the retention rate remains at 6%, we'll be in debt every month."

Prince Xu remained silent.

Zuo Ziliang said, "I'm not defending our previous decisions. Look at the data. In your initial wave of popularity, the traffic redirection rate to us was about 8%. Then you had another surge. If we still calculate based on 8%, our servers will soon be overwhelmed. We won't have enough manpower or scale. We must expand drastically..."

Prince Xu waved his hand and said, "No need to explain. I understand. Just tell me, what's next?"

Zuo Ziliang said, "We either need to increase retention rates, or we need to lay off staff, reduce capacity, and cut losses. That would mean we missed out on this wave of traffic, and everything would be back to square one."

The prince asked humbly, "How can we increase the retention rate?"

Zuo Ziliang glanced at Ye Lan and said, "This is your job. You explain it to him."

Ye Lan placed the documents on her lap and said, "There are many reasons for our low retention rate. The two main ones are that the queuing time is too long and the script coverage is insufficient."

"Before this surge in traffic, our order queue time was 8.8 seconds. After the surge, this time increased to two and a half minutes. Many new users were lost during this process."

"In addition, your script output is two per day. When there were fewer users and speech therapists, this was enough to cover all day long. But now that there are more users, the scripts can no longer cover all users. It is very likely that a user will listen to a script two or three times."

Wang Zixu said, "Anyway, the gist is that there aren't enough speech therapists and not enough scripts. So how many scripts would be enough each day?"

Ye Lan held up four fingers: "In principle, multiply by five. In reality, the more the better. As the number of users grows in the future, the more new scripts there will be each day, the better."

Prince Xu murmured, "Multiplied by five, two pieces would be four thousand, ten pieces twenty thousand..."

"It's impossible." Zuo Ziliang propped one leg up on the coffee table. "This quantity is beyond human limits; quantity can't compensate for quality."

Prince thought for a moment and said, "Then let's add four more scriptwriters."

Zuo Ziliang and Ye Lan looked at him at the same time, and then exchanged a glance.

This is a rather sensitive topic. Wang Zixu's core asset is his scriptwriting ability. Since everyone is still relatively close, they're all holding onto their own territories tightly, so it's always wise to be cautious.

Actually, the reason they were having this charade during the meeting was to increase script production capacity, but neither of them wanted to bring it up first, so they had to let Wang Zixu bring it up himself.

Wang Zixu added, "I haven't communicated with Cheng Xing yet."

Ye Lan straightened up: "Oh, right, I forgot to tell you, Cheng Xing contacted me yesterday. He said he's recently received a lot of commercial collaborations related to The Little Prince, especially from some publishers who want to publish your script."

Prince Xu stared at Ye Lan's back, but his gaze pierced through the wall, looking towards a distant place.

In the past, he would be overjoyed if he learned that his work might be published, but for some reason, he felt nothing when he heard the news today; he was thinking about something else entirely.

"To be honest, Cheng Xing's side didn't actually promote the Wen'ai app at all, which is a pity," Wang Zixu said. "The traffic that could have been converted actually has great potential."

Zuo Ziliang put his hand to his mouth, looking at him with amusement: "What do you think?"

"I'd like to take advantage of this opportunity," Wang Zixu said, "but I have one condition."

"you say."

Prince leaned back on the sofa: "I want an extra 10% of the shares."

Ye Lan's expression changed, and she said, "In that case, your shareholding ratio will be almost equal to ours. Don't you think that's very unfair? We built the entire framework of the app, and we also handled the capital investment and personnel management..."

Zuo Ziliang pulled Ye Lan aside and said, "I'll go outside with her to discuss this, and we'll talk later, okay?"

Prince Xu nodded.

Zuo Ziliang pushed the indignant Ye Lan out the door, then glanced back at him with a complicated look in his eyes.

Wang Zixu felt that his gaze didn't seem like anger at being asked for an exorbitant price, nor was it the greed of someone whose interests had been threatened. It was more of a look of surprise, astonishment at Wang Zixu's change. It was as if he wanted to say, "You've finally seen the light."

Wang Zixu was at a loss for what to do, so he leaned back on the sofa and pondered the problem.

Zuo Ziliang and Ye Lan returned quickly. Ye Lan took the lead and said, "Let's hear what your plans are first."

Wang Zixu said, "I need four people, four people who can study literature full-time, preferably from speech therapists. Give me twenty days, and I can get the script production capacity to meet or even exceed the target."

Zuo Ziliang blinked: "And then?"

Wang Zixu said, "I need an office space, preferably private, equipped with a computer, where I can eat, live, sleep, write, and read at the same time, and I also need three meals a day."

Zuo Ziliang said, "You want to build a team from scratch."

"Yes."

Wang Zixu added, "Besides that, I need to contact Cheng Xing personally. I want to publish my script and print the QR code for the Wen'ai app in the book. I will have him do his best to promote our app."

His words seemed to have some effect, as both Zuo Ziliang and Ye Lan were somewhat moved.

Zuo Ziliang said, "Then I'll be frank with you. If our net profit can double next month, Ye Lan and I wouldn't mind each giving you 0.25% of the shares."