Rebirth 04: Starting from Taking an Unconventional Approach

Han Fei smoked a cigarette at the publishing house entrance and then looked around at each office. Everyone was working diligently. Zhang Ruiyi was in the art editor's office, discussing the design of the next magazine cover with Zheng Xiaowen. Han Fei was quite pleased and stood at the door for a moment without disturbing them.

Han Fei walked back to his office through the deserted corridor, only to find the door slightly ajar. He was certain he had closed the door after leaving, and that even if someone came to his office to get something, they would close the door when they left. Han Fei pushed the door open.

The documentation specialist from the technical team stood in the center of the office, her delicate brows slightly furrowed. She glanced at him as if he had intruded into her office. The woman turned around, her back to Han Fei.

"President Han, I'm just looking around, you don't mind, do you?" the woman said, glancing at the wall.

"Of course I don't mind." Han Fei looked around. "But there's not much to see in my office, just manuscripts and ashtrays. As for you, ignoring that exciting technical discussion over there, you're here looking at the walls. Is that part of the documentation work?"

"President Han, you've misunderstood," the woman said. "I'm not here to look at the walls, I'm here to look at people."

"I?"

"When the technical team arrived, you pushed the core personnel up to coordinate and then stepped back. That's nothing unusual; any competent boss would do that. But instead of going back to your office to wait for news, you went to each office to check on everyone's progress before returning. This shows that you trust Wen Jie, trust him enough to let him face the experts from headquarters without worrying about him showing any weakness or being sidelined. Also, you keep everyone's situation in mind."

Han Fei smiled. So far, he liked this person, but he was also open-minded and ready to change his opinion at any time.

"You are very observant."

"This is my job," the woman said. "The task of a documentation specialist is not only to record technical details, but also to record the overall status of the project, the team's collaboration patterns, and the logic behind the decisions. These things can only be seen by the individual."

"I presume you've already visited all the offices and reached a conclusion?" Han Fei asked casually, not letting the woman realize that he actually wanted to test her capabilities.

"Your team is very interesting," the woman said, turning to Han Fei. "There aren't many people, their qualifications vary, and the office environment isn't exactly great. But after looking around, I sensed something."

"What is it?"

"Motivation. Everyone knows what they are doing and why they are doing it."

Han Fei walked past the woman and sat down in the chair behind the desk: "So you include all of this in the documents you write?"

The woman didn't answer, but instead reached out and stroked the table: "President Han, let me ask you a hypothetical question. What if one day, Tencent takes 20 million yuan, rents an entire floor in the best office building in Shanghai, and poachs your editors with double the salary and your programmers with triple the salary?"

Han Fei searched his body for cigarettes, thinking that this was not a hypothetical question.

"I will tell them," Han Fei said, "Twenty million can buy a floor, but it can't buy the nights these people spent together. Three times the salary might poach someone, but it can't take away his memory of every line of code in this system, or the feelings he poured into those manuscripts. And when Tencent really went this far, it meant they were desperate."

"That sounds very sentimental," the woman said, flashing a smile that revealed her perfectly white teeth, but her smile was somewhat reserved.

"But it's also true."

The woman sat down in the chair opposite the desk, crossed her legs, and said, "I've seen your content review process. It's a triple review, and every article is recorded. Did you decide on this?"

"Yes," Han Fei said, "it's a rule that was set from the very beginning."

"Why?" the woman asked. "The content you're making is already quite stimulating. If you loosen the boundaries a bit more, the conversion rate might be even higher. Haven't you thought about that?"

"I've thought about it. But some red lines, once crossed, can't be crossed. We're a small company now, and we can't afford any setbacks. If one draft has a problem, the whole project might be ruined. Rather than gambling on that probability, it's better to tighten the fences from the beginning."

"If one day you grow big and become a leader in the industry, will you then loosen your restrictions?"

"No," Han Fei said without hesitation. "A red line is a red line. When you're small, you don't touch it to survive; when you're big, you don't touch it to survive longer. Those companies that eventually ran into trouble, weren't they all arrogant after they grew big, thinking they could play it safe, and ended up crossing the line?"

The woman stared at Han Fei for a long while.

"One last question, President Han," the woman paused, as if to remind Han Fei to prepare himself, "How did you come up with this model?"

Han Fei was about to put the unlit cigarette to his lips when his outstretched hand suddenly stopped in mid-air.

"I'm not questioning you," the woman said. "Among the entrepreneurs I know, most of their models have a source—either there's a counterpart abroad, or someone in the industry has tried it. But with your model, I can't find a counterpart. We've been in the SP (Service Provider) business for three years, and nobody's thought of using SMS to serialize novels. We've been in the publishing industry for twenty years, and nobody's thought of using SP channels for paid reading. You've grafted two completely unrelated industries together, and so precisely. How to choose content, how to write copy, how to measure conversion rates—it seems like every step has been calculated countless times. This doesn't seem like a flash of inspiration; it's more like... you already knew this path would work."

Han Fei held a cigarette between his lips, gently biting the filter: "Have you ever had this feeling, where you know exactly how things will turn out even though you've never experienced them?"

The woman raised one of her delicate eyebrows slightly: "You mean intuition?"

"It was a deduction," Han Fei said. "Before taking over the publishing house, I spent a lot of time thinking about this problem. I wasn't thinking about how to do it, but what the results would be if I did it this way. I deduced every possibility: the direction of the content, the user's reaction, the feedback from the channels, and the response from the giants. In the end, only this one path remained."

The woman put a finger to her lips, seemingly lost in thought.

Han Fei lit a cigarette and looked at the woman, finding it difficult to determine whether she had accepted his explanation. Well, he thought, in any case, this was the only logically plausible explanation he could come up with—the extreme thinking and deduction forced upon a person in a desperate situation.

"So you've done the deductions," the woman said after a long pause, "What questions will I ask you?"

"Yes. But I didn't expect you to ask such a deep question."

"Okay." The woman nodded. "I'm done asking. Do you have any questions?"

Han Fei exhaled a puff of smoke, watching it rise to the ceiling: "What exactly do you do for a living?"

The woman simply smiled slightly, as if he had said something amusing, then got up and left.