Appreciate space photography

Regarding the online query, the board of directors of Meitu Xiu Xiu said: Cryptographic currency has enough appreciation space, which can be used to spread the risk of holding cash in fund management.

From this point of view, Meitu's chairman wants to emulate Tesla and bet on the bitcoin market.

Cai Wensheng's move is not "inaction". As a tool product, Meitu Xiu Xiu is not frequently used by users, and its advertising revenue is weak, and the company's profit is insufficient. Hoping to improve the company's financial report through investment income is essentially an act of "encircling Wei to save Zhao".

After all, he and Wu, the founder of Meitu, are not only old partners for more than ten years, but also fellow villagers in Quanzhou. It is human nature to help fellow villagers.

At the end of 1990s, a high school boy named Ma in Fujian made a condition: I hoarded a domain name of "qq2000.com", can it be changed into a 5-digit qq nickname?

Ma Hua Teng thanked him politely and said, I'm not interested.

After being rejected by Ma, the high school student kept on dumping the domain name. Not long after, he sold 300 thousand by selling domain names.

At the same time, he is about to face the college entrance examination, because he loved art since he was a child and yearned to become an artist. In his sophomore year, he was admitted to the Painting Department of Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts, and he won the first place.

At that time, while holding a fresh and hot 300 thousand, he looked at his past report card, thought about it and made a major decision to change the trajectory of his life.

This kid's name is Wu

Wu was born in a relatively wealthy family in Quanzhou, Fujian. His father is in business and owns his own factory. From small to large, Wu hardly had food and clothing, and his parents tried their best to raise their son.

Wu likes art very much. He began to learn painting when he was in kindergarten, and he had a systematic professional study in junior high school.

1996, Wu 15 years old, graduated from junior high school. One day, he overheard his painting teacher mention that many teachers would go to China Academy of Fine Arts for further study. Wu thought that even teachers should go to this school for further study, so they simply didn't go to high school and went directly for further study.

So before entering high school, Wu went to Hangzhou and studied oil painting at China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou for two years.

On the first day in Hangzhou, Wu went to the largest bookstore in Hangzhou and spent 600 yuan to buy a new set of paintings. He couldn't put it down. At that time, he vowed to go to the Louvre in France to see the original painting in the future.

But soon, Wu, who was born in a merchant's family, keenly felt the poverty of artistic path.

He found that artists and friends around him either choose to draw "line drawings" or go to art training schools as teachers after graduation, but no matter which choice, most people's income is to make a living at most, which makes him hard to accept.

Two years later, Wu returned to Quanzhou and re-entered the first grade of high school after studying in the Academy of Fine Arts.

1999 One day, Wu read a news in the newspaper: a domain name named "business.com" actually sold for 7.5 million dollars in the United States, which made Wu an eye-opener. He ran home and borrowed 10 thousand yuan from his parents, saying that he wanted to start a business.

Although my father's business was going downhill at that time, his family was not as good as before, but because most Quanzhou people had business genes and did not exclude their children from trying to start a business, they didn't ask much, so they left it to Wu at the price of 10000 yuan. Wu took the money and happily plunged into the domain name field.

At that time, the average price of domain names was around 500 yuan. At first, Wu didn't know much about it, and none of the domain names selected in one year were sold. Until 2000, Wu finally got the first deal and sold his "e23.com" domain name for $3,000. All the wasted 1 000 yuan was recovered at once.

This made Wu extremely excited.

This year, Cai Wensheng, a businessman from Quanzhou, Fujian, was engaged in the family's import and export trade and real estate development. Wu saw the "business.com" domain name transaction in the newspaper, and so did he. With the acumen of a businessman, he felt he had a chance.

Therefore, Cai Wensheng abandoned the family business and invested all the existing funds in the domain name field.

However, like Wu, this valuable international domain was almost fully registered in 2000, and a lot of tuition fees were paid for it. During that time, I often learned from domain name forums, and so did Wu.

Soaking, I found Wu and chatted for a while. In fact, the two were still fellow villagers in Quanzhou, and they suddenly felt that they appreciated each other and met each other.

So I asked Wu to discuss the domain name from time to time, and Wu entered the third year of high school. He doesn't study hard every day, and he also ponders how to invest to make big money, which makes Wu's parents feel that his son has met a liar.

By the end of 2000, they gradually found their way and focused on grabbing valuable and possibly "fallen" domain names. Slowly, investment has improved. By 200 1, when the college entrance examination was about to take place, Wu earned 300,000 yuan by selling domain names.

This year, Wu was 20 years old. He took the biggest sum of private money in his life and made a major decision-giving up the college entrance examination and starting a business.

Wu's parents kept bothering their son, but they also chose to support him. Wu's Internet entrepreneurial career officially began.

However, every successful entrepreneur will always experience several failures in the early days, but in comparison, Wu has more failures.

With 300,000 yuan, Wu registered a dating website with the domain name.

Many years later, when it comes to why you want to register a dating website, Wu is also very puzzled. Why do you want to make friends when you are obviously introverted and your legs are trembling in public?

Because he is not good at it, it is difficult for Wu to do this. During that time, when he was paid at the end of each month, it was his biggest headache. Soon, 300 thousand was spent.

Later, Wu had to borrow money to pay his salary. Every time he borrows a sum of money, he writes it down in a small book. On one occasion, this bookkeeping book was accidentally discovered by colleagues. Wu felt ashamed and finally made up his mind to close the company.

Later, Wu did several internet projects in succession, but they all ended in failure.

In 2005, desperate Wu had to find it again: Brother, you have to help your brother.

In recent years, Cai Wensheng has not been idle. After investing in the domain name with Wu Chenggong, he successively invested in Internet companies such as Flash Shopping, 58 City, Dianlv, and became its shareholders. He also initiated a meeting of webmasters in China. Comparatively speaking, our resources and financial resources are far above Wu Zhi.

In this way, Wu was invited to join the new company, and after the merger, he started research and development of various products.

At first, Wu had no direction or goal. They tried anything they thought was good. In those two years, they made 30 products, stocks, videos and information in all directions. However, because no one is very good at it, no product has been successfully manufactured.

Time flies to 2007, when Wu was 26 years old. She has been struggling for six or seven years since she dropped out of high school. Her marriage has been itching for seven years, and so has her business.

Wu, who has accomplished nothing, is anxious at the moment.

But the turning point of fate is precisely the moment when this person is the easiest to give up.

Non-mainstream was rampant in 2007. It was an era of killing Matt everywhere, an era of QQ space and QQ signature.

With the development of Internet, some young Internet users begin to like to communicate in a personalized way. A special character symbol spread from Taiwan Province Province and gradually appeared in QQ space and QQ signature.

This special character symbol, which combines traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, ancient Chinese and Yan characters, is nicknamed "Martian" by netizens because it is not easy to understand.

Although "Martian" is interesting, it still takes some effort to type it.

Wu He failed more than 30 times, but their business acumen is still online. Wu saw the business opportunities behind "Martian".

After consulting with Cai Wensheng, he spent three days hammering out a software called "Martians", whose function is very simple. As long as the text is input, it can be converted into various symbols and combinations of traditional Chinese characters, Japanese and Korean.

In other words, with this software, you have the ability to input "Martians" at any time.

It turned out that Wu didn't take "Martians" seriously at all. After all, it is not difficult to do, and the operation is not innovative and unique. It is nothing more than a program similar to the input method.

However, once the software was launched, it quickly split. In less than a year, the number of users exceeded 40 million.

Having made so many products, I met with success for the first time, which made Wu "suddenly wake up".

He finally realized that the fundamental reason for the failure of developing products so many times before was that he did not analyze the user market.

The reason why "Martian" was popular was because I focused on a new generation of young people, who were the main force, vitality and mainstream of the Internet at that time.

With the saturation of "Martian" users, Wu He began to think about whether they can develop another product that can not only seize the youth market, but also make up for other shortcomings of the computer system.

At this time, Wu abandoned his expertise for many years and played a role here.

Wu studied fine arts for so many years, but later he stopped painting and became fascinated with photography. In short, in Wu's childhood, adolescence and youth, he could not do without pictures and pictures.

After the success of "Martian" in 2007, Wu began to ponder the world of young people all day and often participated in photography forums.

At that time, most of the popular photos of girls in the photography forum were beautiful films with large aperture and blurred background, and the only means to achieve all this was PS.

At this time, the word "P picture" spread. Any photo that is too different from me, or that looks fake, will be laughed at and said: you are a P picture.

Wu found that although P-picture was basically a derogatory term at that time, many girls rushed to the forum for help: help me become beautiful.

After all, software such as PS is very difficult for non-professionals, and it is often counterproductive for laymen to operate, which cannot meet the needs of making photos beautiful.

Wu also smells business opportunities: why not be a "fool" PS?

Just do it, this time, they decided to focus on this business and make it into a boutique, so they cut off all other products and concentrated all their energy on starting this software.

June 5438+October 2008 10, a software named "Meitu Master" was officially launched. In this software, the original PS image needs to be pounded 10 minutes or more, and it takes more than ten steps to achieve the effect. It can be completed with one click. Although in the eyes of many professionals, the pictures made by master Meitu are too low-level, in fact, for 90% of the public.

The original user source of Meitu Master is not difficult, because it is basically the same as the user group of Mars. Through the diversion of tens of millions of users on Mars, it only took two months, and the number of users of Meitu Master exceeded 20 million.

Seeing this achievement, Wu He smiled at each other: This road is finally right!

Later, in order to shorten the distance between users, at the suggestion of Cai Wensheng, they changed "Meitu Master" to "Meitu Xiu Xiu". With the support of, Wu officially spun off the company and became the CEO of Meitu Xiu Xiu.

Next, in the face of competitors entering the market one after another, Wu Jin made a series of optimizations, such as focusing on women, adding functions such as one-click skin changing, one-click face-lifting and whitening, and Meitu Xiu Xiu won more women's love for a time.

After nearly ten years of operation, Wu finally succeeded!

But at that time, he didn't expect that what made him more anxious was still behind.

In 2020, Wu, who has been listed, was interviewed by Tencent. When asked why Meitu didn't make money when it went public, Wu pouted and smiled, saying that Meitu, as a single product, had too little profit margin.

In fact, in recent years, one thing has been bothering Wu, that is, Meitu does not make money.

Many people wonder that Mito is widely used and has many products. How can you not make money?

In fact, by 2020, Meitu's losses will reach 1, 2 1 billion yuan for seven consecutive years.

At first, Meitu sold mobile phones for a while. At that time, Meitu's main profit point was mostly on mobile phones, but the turnover of beauty mobile phones was less than Huawei's 1%.

Later, in order to concentrate on improvement, Wu He cut off the mobile phone project and sold it to Xiaomi, but how to make Meitu profitable is still a big problem.

Anyone who has used Meitu knows that it is a free software. How to make a profit on a free software mainly depends on online advertising. There is a contradiction here. If you want to make a profit, you need advertisements, but too many advertisements will inevitably affect the user experience and there will be the possibility of user loss.

Around 20 14, Wu took the lead in entering the short video market together with American film. In fact, he entered the market quite early and accumulated many users. Until 20 17, meipai was the leader in the field of short video.

But it was also in this year that Tik Tok appeared like a dark horse. It quickly squeezed out all its competitors and occupied the whole market with lightning speed.

Wu was left unprepared and exhausted.

Later, Wu reluctantly accepted the fact that he could not do it

What can we do? We can only change the track and find another way.

In an interview with Tencent last year, he mentioned the socialization of Meitu, which is the latest operation strategy of Meitu since 2020.

Wu said that users who use Meitu are actually the main group in social interaction, because they like Meitu, want to make themselves beautiful and make beautiful videos, with the ultimate goal of sharing.

It is also based on this that he has the idea of exploring the social field.

In May last year, Wu ordered the company to "start a second venture" and launched the "social circle" photo community function. At the same time, because the company has been 10 years, there are some big company diseases, such as bloated institutions and bureaucracy.

In order to make the company younger, Wu made great efforts to reform, and the whole company was basically born after 95 or even 00. In order to integrate with young people, Wu deliberately went to play with the 00-year-old.

However, the generation gap is inevitable, and Wu is at a loss.

Born in 198 1, this young man engaged in literature and art has been in business for 20 years and is still struggling with how to make money. When he is most anxious, he relies on drugs every day to fall asleep.

At present, it is difficult for Meitu Xiu Xiu to find an effective development direction at the strategic level, but the product operation moves frequently.

Look at the ip Godzilla and Song Gong Temple co-produced by Meitu and Xiu Xiu. The results of these two TV series are not satisfactory in both market share and word of mouth. It can be seen that Meitu's seemingly creative product activities just ended hastily.

However, Meitu Xiu Xiu did not give up because of this. After the film and television ip cooperation project failed to achieve the expected results, we focused on Mother's Day on May 9, and launched the Mother's Day theme "Meitu Formula" to help major users generate mother-specific pictures with warm pictures, warm-hearted copywriting and creative materials to express their deep love for their mothers.

After the launch of this activity, the usage of Mother's Day theme Mito formula exceeded 2.6 million, and the data was considerable. However, compared with the usage of Mito formula of 65.438+0.2 billion during the Spring Festival, the data of this activity still has a lot of room for improvement.

But Meitu Xiu Xiu seems to want to explore more development possibilities of the company from the operational level. Recently, the popular variety show "Qipa Shuo" shows that a debater named Lu Xiao broke a golden sentence in the debate "Online Love Encounters Derailment": "If P picture is really derailed, why not call Meitu Xiu Xiu, the retouching software in your mobile phone?"

This debate happened to be related to the theme of the picture, so Meitu Xiu Xiu decided decisively to use the path debater to clear his name through wonderful words and improve the exposure of the product.

Since the listing of 20 16, the market value of Meitu has increased from more than 80 billion at the peak to more than 80 billion today. Although Meitu Xiu Xiu has been exploring more possibilities in business, the profit model of Meitu is still unclear, which belongs to Wu's business future and still has a long way to go.