Rebirth 04: Starting from Taking an Unconventional Approach

Over the next hour, Han Fei briefly reviewed the business situation for the past week. The online conversion rate had continued to rise to over 16%, and offline magazine sales had exceeded 40,000 copies. As for the one-line submission system, just as they had initially anticipated, the duality of this system quickly became apparent. Due to the extremely low barrier to entry, the sheer volume of submissions had created a massive workload for the editorial department within days; they had to expend considerable effort sifting through the garbage to find the real gems. Moreover, after screening, they still needed to find material providers to develop the stories into novels.

Han Fei realized that with the current size of the editorial team, it would be difficult to maintain this mechanism indefinitely, and continuing like this could lead to gaining a small advantage while losing a big one. Therefore, in order to avoid dragging down the main business, Han Fei decided to put the Roots-Tracing Project at a controlled pace, shifting from unchecked growth to meticulous cultivation.

First, Wen Jie was asked to build a simple backend filtering system to conduct the first round of screening of submissions received online. However, due to the technological limitations of that era, the system could only perform a rough screening, automatically removing submissions that were clearly spam, invalid, duplicates, or too short, and marking the remaining submissions that appeared to be valuable for manual review.

The second step was to schedule the processing of one-sentence submissions for Wednesday afternoons, without interfering with daily review time, and to control the quality of output, initially setting a maximum of five to eight root-seeking works per month. Other qualified submissions were bought out and stored in an internal material library, from which contracted authors could select materials at any time to write complete novels, thus relieving some of the pressure on the editorial department's incubation work.

The third step is to raise the submission threshold from "one sentence" to "Please use one sentence or a paragraph to tell a true story fragment that you personally experienced or heard. It needs to include: who (characters), what happened (event), and why this event is special (conflict, suspense, accident, or a feeling that tugs at the heartstrings). If you can tell a complete story in a few hundred words, it will be given priority and the payment will be more generous."

Finally, there's the issue of team expansion. Currently, Qingniao's most pressing needs are for technical personnel, content editors, and channel and business development staff.

The headquarters' technical team will be leaving soon. Going forward, not only will they need to build a filtering backend for one-sentence submissions, but the system also requires continuous optimization. Furthermore, the user profiling system, provincial push notifications, and green channels all need constant maintenance; otherwise, if the system crashes or is attacked, the entire SP business will be paralyzed. Wen Jie simply cannot handle all of this alone.

Han Fei asked Wen Jie to find a way to recruit a backend development engineer, a database engineer, and a frontend development engineer.

"Brother Fei, you asked me to recruit people..." Wen Jie said, "Actually, I've already thought about it several times. I do have a classmate who would be quite suitable. I was too embarrassed to ask you before, but now that the system pressure is on, I have no choice but to ask."

"Why are you embarrassed?"

Wen Jie pouted his lower lip: "Because he has one condition for looking for a job, which is that he doesn't have to work in the office. He only needs to come to the company when there is something to coordinate, and the rest of the time he can work remotely. He said he is more efficient at coding at home. But he doesn't have high requirements for salary. If the workload is not too heavy, two or three thousand is fine."

"How are your abilities?"

"He's very strong. His PHP is cleaner than mine, and he's also skilled in server maintenance. We worked together to fix a bug on an open-source project before, and he can read code twice as fast as I can."

Is he at work right now?

"He was writing backend code for a company that makes SP games, the kind where you download mini-games via SMS," Wen Jie said. "He told me that the company was going out of business, and the boss was constantly pushing them to make more exciting themes, but he didn't want to do that kind of thing. He wanted to make a proper system, the kind where he could learn something."

Han Fei nodded: "We can let him come over. But we need to control access to the core code and prevent sensitive data from being leaked. Have him sign a confidentiality agreement. Remote access is fine, but critical server operations must be logged."

"No problem." Wen Jie smiled. "Back in school, everyone said he was even more stubborn than me and wouldn't do anything reckless. If he comes, he'll be in charge of the backend and operations. I'll ask around in the classmates' group for data and frontend."

"Okay, I'll leave the technical recruitment to you." Han Fei looked at Lu Hai, "The rest is up to Lu Hai. You'll recruit one person to handle the initial review of one-sentence submissions, one business development person, and at least three editors."

"Hiring so many editors?" Lu Hai said.

"Lu Hai, do you think I have money to burn?" Han Fei chuckled a few times. "The editorial department is already operating at full capacity, and the workload will only increase. It's not just about reviewing manuscripts; the township liaison station model is just starting out, and we need people to be responsible for training, supervision, and expansion. This aggressive distribution incident also exposed the fragility of our channel management, making us realize that we must establish a formal channel management system. You are all core members who have fought alongside Qingniao through dire straits; you understand the company's content tone, business processes, and cultural DNA best. You can't be bogged down in a lot of repetitive, procedural basic work for a long time; that would be a waste of your abilities. So only by finding people to share those basic tasks can you free up your hands to do the truly important things, such as final content review, core author maintenance, major channel negotiations... helping Qingniao to deepen its content, stabilize its channels, and strengthen its brand."

Han Fei accepted the applause, looked directly into everyone's eyes, and thanked each person. It was an ordinary Saturday morning. In the past two months, Qingniao Publishing House also had weekends off. However, from the launch of SP to the publication of the magazine, and then to dealing with the impact of Tencent and illegal publications, the entire company had long lost the concept of weekends. But no one had uttered a single complaint.

He looked at the radiant, serious, and resolute faces of the crowd, and saw them nod as if they were of one mind. He saw that they were moved by this moment, moved by his words, and moved by the power that drove everyone in the meeting room.

"Boss, I've been waiting for this arrangement for almost a month," Zhang Meimei said. "To be honest, I've wanted to bring it up with you for a long time. We old guys haven't had time to properly organize all the channel resources and author relationships we've accumulated."

"Twenty years ago, our generation wouldn't have dared to even think about this idea," Zhou Jianguo said. "Back then, it would take an editor at least ten years to go from proofreading to final review. But you're doing this, sending us old folks up to do the basic work."

Han Fei smiled slightly: "To be honest, I remember everyone working tirelessly day and night with me during this time. Qingniao's ability to come out of the brink of despair and get to where it is today is not due to me alone, but to everyone here. Thank you all for your contributions."