The founder of "Scam": Dropped out of school, borrowed money to start a business, failed more than 30 times, and the company's current market value is nearly 10 billion

Regarding online doubts, the board of directors of Meitu Xiu Xiu said: Cryptocurrency has enough room for appreciation and can be used to diversify the risks of holding cash in fund management.

From this point of view, the chairman of Meitu wants to imitate Tesla and bet on the market price of Bitcoin.

Cai Wensheng’s move is not “not doing his job properly”. As a tool-based product, Meitu Xiuxiu is not used frequently by users, advertising revenue is weak, and the company’s profits are insufficient. Cai Wensheng hopes to improve the company’s financial report through investment income. , is essentially an act of "surrounding Wei and rescuing Zhao".

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

In the late 1990s, a high school boy from Fujian called Ma Huateng and made a condition: I have a "qq2000.com" domain name, can I change it to a 5-digit QQ one? Nice account?

Ma Huateng thanked him politely, and then said that I was not interested.

Even after being rejected by Ma Huateng, this high school student did not lose heart and continued to sell domain names. Before long, he sold the domain name for 300,000 yuan.

At the same time, he was about to face the college entrance examination, because he had loved art since he was a child and yearned to be an artist. In his sophomore year of high school, he took the exam for the professional course of the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, and he got the first place in the exam.

At that time, while holding a fresh and warm 300,000 yuan, he looked at his past transcripts, thought about it, and made a major decision that changed the trajectory of his life.

This boy’s name is Wu Xinhong.

Wu Xinhong was born in a relatively wealthy family in Quanzhou, Fujian. His father was in business and had his own factory. Since childhood, Wu Xinhong had basically never worried about food and clothing, and his parents did their best to train their son.

Wu Xinhong loves art. He started learning to draw when he was in kindergarten. He went to junior high school and conducted systematic professional studies.

In 1996, Wu Xinhong was 15 years old and graduated from junior high school. One day, he overheard his painting teacher mention that many teachers would go to the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou for further studies. Wu Xinhong thought to himself, even the teachers should go there. If I study in this school, I might as well not go to high school and go directly to study. Wouldn’t it be a one-step process?

Before entering high school, Wu Xinhong ran to Hangzhou and studied oil painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou for 2 years.

On the first day he arrived in Hangzhou, Wu Xinhong went to the largest bookstore in Hangzhou and spent 600 yuan to buy a copy of "The Collection of Paintings from the Louvre Museum". He couldn't put it down and vowed at that time that he would have the opportunity in the future. You must go to the Louvre in France to see the original paintings.

But soon, Wu Xinhong, who was born in a businessman's family, keenly felt that the art path was likely to be poor.

He found that the artist friends around him either chose to paint "traditional paintings" after graduation, or went to art training schools to become teachers, but no matter which choice they chose, most people's income was at most a living. , which made it difficult for him to accept.

Two years later, Wu Xinhong completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and returned to Quanzhou to attend high school again.

One day in 1999, Wu Xinhong saw a news in the newspaper: a domain name called "business.com" was sold for US$7.5 million in the United States. This opened Wu Xinhong's eyes. I ran home and borrowed 10,000 yuan from my parents, saying I wanted to start a business.

Although my father's business was in decline at that time and the family's financial situation was not as good as it used to be, the Quanzhou People's Congress had business genes, so they were not opposed to their children's attempts to start a business, so they didn't ask any questions. He gave Wu Xinhong 10,000 yuan. Wu Xinhong took the money and happily plunged into the domain name field.

At that time, the average price of domain names was around 500 yuan. Wu Xinhong didn’t understand much at first, and none of the domain names he selected was sold in a year. It was not until 2000 that Wu Xinhong finally waited for his first transaction. He sold the domain name "e23.com" in his hand for 3,000 US dollars. The original 10,000 yuan wasted, and all of it was recovered in one fell swoop.

This made Wu Xinhong extremely excited.

This year, Cai Wensheng, a businessman in Quanzhou, Fujian, was running his family's import and export trade and real estate development. On the day Wu Xinhong saw the domain name transaction of "business.com" in the newspaper, he He also saw it, and with the acumen of a businessman, he felt that there was an opportunity here.

As a result, Cai Wensheng gave up the family business and invested all his existing funds in the domain name field.

However, like Wu Xinhong, in 2000, all the valuable international domain names had been registered, and Cai Wensheng also paid a lot of tuition. During that time, Cai Wensheng often attended domain name forums to learn experience, and so did Wu Xinhong.

While soaking, Cai Wensheng discovered Wu Xinhong. As soon as they chatted, they found out that they were fellow villagers in Quanzhou. They immediately felt that they cherished each other and regretted meeting each other so late.

So Cai Wensheng asked Wu Xinhong out every now and then to discuss domain names. Wu Xinhong entered the third year of high school and did not study hard every day. He and Cai Wensheng thought about how to invest and make big money. This made Wu Xinhong's parents think that their son had encountered a scammer.

By the end of 2000, the two gradually found a way and set their sights on valuable domain names that might "fall off" through rush registration. Slowly, their investment began to pick up. By the time he was about to take the college entrance examination in 2001, Wu Xinhong made a full 300,000 yuan by reselling domain names.

This year, Wu Xinhong was 20 years old. With the largest amount of private money in his life, he made a major decision - to give up the college entrance examination and start a business.

Wu Xinhong’s parents chose to support their son even though they were constantly struggling. Wu Xinhong’s Internet entrepreneurial career officially began.

Any successful entrepreneur will always experience several failures in the early stage, but in comparison, Wu Xinhong’s failures were a bit high.

With 300,000 yuan, Wu Xinhong registered a dating website with the domain name 520.com.

Many years later, when talking about why he signed up for a dating website, Wu Xinhong was also puzzled. He didn’t know why he went to make friends despite his introverted personality and his legs shaking even when talking in public.

Because Wu Xinhong was not good at it, it was very difficult for him to do it. During that period, when his salary was paid at the end of the month, it was the most troublesome time for him. Soon, all 300,000 yuan was spent.

Later, Wu Xinhong had to borrow money to pay his salary. Every time he borrowed a sum, he would write it down in a small book. Once, this bookkeeping was accidentally discovered by a colleague. Wu Xinhong felt ashamed and finally Determined to shut down the company.

Later, Wu Xinhong worked on several Internet projects in succession, but they all ended in failure.

In 2005, Wu Xinhong was desperate and had to find Cai Wensheng again: Brother, you have to help your brother.

In the past few years, Cai Wensheng has not been idle. After successfully investing in domain names with Wu Xinhong, he successively invested in Internet company projects such as Internet Express, 58.com, and eDonkey, and became their shareholder. It also launched the China Webmaster Conference. In comparison, Cai Wensheng’s resources and financial resources are far superior to Wu Xinhong.

In this way, Wu Xinhong was invited to join Cai Wensheng's company. After the two merged, they began the research and development of various product projects.

In the beginning, Wu Xinhong had no direction or goals. The two of them tried whatever they thought was good. In those two years, they launched 30 products in various directions, including stocks and videos. , information, but because no one is very good at it, no product has been successfully built.

Time flies to 2007, when Wu Xinhong is 26 years old. He has been struggling for six or seven years since he dropped out of high school. He has been struggling for seven years in marriage and starting a business.

Wu Xinhong, who had accomplished nothing, was feeling anxious at the moment.

But the turn of fortune came belatedly at the moment when it is easiest for people to give up.

In 2007, the non-mainstream was rampant. It was an era of killing people everywhere. It was an era of QQ Space and QQ Signature dominating the screen.

With the development of the Internet, some young Internet users began to like to communicate in personalized text. A special text symbol spread from Taiwan and gradually appeared in QQ Space and QQ In the signature.

This special text symbol combines traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, ancient characters, emoticons and other styles. Because it is not easy to understand, it is nicknamed "Mars text" by netizens.

Although the "Mars Essay" is interesting, if you want to type it out, it still takes a lot of effort.

Wu Xinhong and Cai Wensheng failed more than 30 times, but their business acumen is still online. Wu Xinhong saw the business opportunities behind "Mars Literature".

He discussed with Cai Wensheng and spent 3 days working on a software called "Mars Text". The function is also very simple. Just input the text and it can be converted into various words. A combination of symbols and traditional Chinese characters, Japanese, and Korean.

In other words, with this software, you have the ability to type "Mars writing" at any time.

Originally, Wu Xinhong didn't take "Martian Text" too seriously. After all, it was not difficult to do, and there was nothing innovative or novel in its operation. It was nothing more than a program similar to an input method.

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

After making so many products, Wu Xinhong "came to his senses" when he encountered success for the first time.

He finally realized that the fundamental reason why he had failed in developing products so many times before was that he failed to analyze the user market.

The reason why "Martian Literature" became popular was because he set his sights on the new generation of young people, who were the main force, vitality and mainstream of the Internet at that time.

With the saturation of users of "Mars Wen", Wu Xinhong and Cai Wensheng began to think about whether they could develop another product that could capture the young market and make up for other shortcomings of the computer system. ?

At this time, the expertise that Wu Xinhong had abandoned for many years came into play here.

Wu Xinhong studied art for so many years, but later he stopped painting and became obsessed with photography. In short, during Wu Xinhong’s childhood, adolescence and youth, he was inseparable from paintings and pictures.

After the success of "Mars Literature" in 2007, Wu Xinhong has been thinking about the world of young people all day long, and often attends photography forums.

At that time, most of the beautiful photos of girls popular in photography forums were beautiful photos with large apertures and blurred backgrounds, and the only way to achieve all of this was PS.

The word p-picture has been popular since that time. Anyone whose photo is too different from the person, or the photo looks fake, will be laughed at and said: This is your P photo.

Wu Xinhong discovered that although P-pictures were basically a derogatory term at that time, many girls still flocked to them and went to the forum to ask for help: help me make P-pictures more beautiful.

After all, software like PS is very difficult for non-professionals to operate. If a layman operates it, it will often have the opposite effect and fail to achieve the goal of making the photos beautiful.

Wu Xinhong sensed business opportunities again: Why not be a "fool" PS?

Just do it. This time, they decided to focus on this business and make it a high-quality product. So they cut off all other products and concentrated all their energy on this software.

In October 2008, a software called "Photo Master" was officially launched. In this software, PS originally required more than 10 minutes of tinkering and a dozen steps to achieve the desired effect. It can be done with just one click. Although in the eyes of many professionals, the pictures produced by the photo master are too low, in fact, they are enough for 90% of the public.

The number of Meitu Master users exceeded 20 million.

Seeing this result, Wu Xinhong and Cai Wensheng looked at each other and smiled: This road is finally on the right track!

Later, in order to shorten the distance between users, at Cai Wensheng’s suggestion, they changed “Meitu Master” to “Meitu Xiuxiu”. With Cai Wensheng’s support, Wu Xinhong officially made the company independent. Become the CEO of "MeituXiuXiu".

Next, in the face of competitors entering the market one after another, Wu Xinhong carried out a series of optimizations, such as focusing on women, adding functions such as one-click skin resurfacing, one-click face slimming, whitening, etc., showing off beautiful pictures. Time has gained the favor of more women.

After nearly ten years of entrepreneurship, Wu Xinhong finally succeeded!

But at that time, he did not expect that things that would make him even more anxious were still to come.

In 2020, Wu Xinhong, who had already run the company until it was listed, accepted an interview with Tencent. When asked why he was not making money even though he had listed Meitu, Wu Xinhong pursed his lips. , smiled and said, maybe Meitu, as a single product, has too little profit margin.

In fact, one thing has always troubled Wu Xinhong over the years, that is, beautiful pictures do not make money.

Many people wonder that Meitu is used so widely and has so many products, how can it not make money?

In fact, as of 2020, Meitu has suffered losses of 12.1 billion yuan for seven consecutive years.

In the beginning, Meitu sold mobile phones for a period of time. At that time, most of Meitu’s main profit points were mobile phones, but the turnover of beauty mobile phones was less than 100% of Huawei’s. one.

Later, in order to focus on improvement, Wu Xinhong and Cai Wensheng canceled the mobile phone project and sold it to Xiaomi. However, how to make Meitu profitable was 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. This is a contradiction here. If you want to make a profit, , it requires the amount of advertising, but too much advertising will inevitably affect the user experience and lead to the possibility of user loss.

Around 2014, Wu Xinhong took the lead in entering the short video market with Meipai. In fact, he entered the market quite early and accumulated a good number of users. Until 2017, Meipai was the The leader in the short video field.

But it was also this year that Douyin appeared like a dark horse. With lightning speed, it quickly squeezed out all its opponents and occupied the entire market.

What was left to Wu Xinhong was being caught off guard and exhausted.

Later, Wu Xinhong reluctantly accepted the fact that he could not do Douyin.

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

In an interview with Tencent last year, he mentioned Meitu Social, which is also Meitu’s latest operating strategy since 2020.

Wu Xinhong said that the users of Meitu are actually the main group of people socializing on the Internet, because they like beautiful pictures, want to make themselves beautiful, and shoot beautiful videos, with the ultimate goal of sharing.

It was precisely based on this that he had the idea of ??exploring the social field.

In May last year, Wu Xinhong called on the company to "start a second business" and launched the "Social Circle" picture community function. At the same time, because the company has been around for 10 years, it still suffers from some of the diseases of large companies, such as bloated institutions and bureaucracy.

In order to rejuvenate the company, Wu Xinhong vigorously reformed. The entire company is basically made up of people born in 1995 or even after 2000. In order to integrate into the young people, Wu Xinhong also went out to play with those born in 2000.

However, the generation gap of the times is inevitable, and Wu Xinhong is still somewhat unable to do what he wants.

This young man, who was born in 1981 and is engaged in literature and art, was still struggling with how to make money when he started his business 20 years ago. When he was most anxious, he had to rely on medicine every day to fall asleep.

It is difficult for Meitu Xiuxiu to find an effective development direction at the strategic level, but it is making frequent moves in product operations.

Looking at the film and television IPs "Godzilla" and "Da Song Gong Ci" co-operated by Meitu Xiuxiu, the results of these two film and television dramas are not very satisfactory in terms of market share and reputation. , it can be seen that Meitu’s seemingly creative product activities only ended hastily.

However, Meitu Xiuxiu did not give up because of this. After the film and television IP cooperation project did not meet expectations, it set its sights on Mother's Day on May 9 and launched the Mother's Day theme "Meitu". "Picture Recipe" uses warm pictures, heart-warming copywriting, and creative materials to help users generate exclusive pictures for mothers to express their deep love for mothers.

After this event was launched, the number of Mother’s Day themed beauty formulas used exceeded 2.6 million, which is relatively impressive. However, compared to the 120 million usage of beauty formulas during the Spring Festival, the data for this event is still low. There is a lot of room for improvement.

However, Meitu Xiuxiu seems to be hoping to explore more development possibilities for the company from the operational level. The recently popular variety show "Qi Pa Shuo" showed that a debater named Xiaolu was debating a topic. "Online dating encounters 'photo fraud', should I rise to the challenge?" broke out a golden sentence that sparked heated discussions on the Internet: "If the P picture is really a scam, then the photo editing software Meitu on your phone Why don’t you call Xiu Xiu a beautiful picture?"

The topic of the debate happened to be related to the theme of the picture, so Meitu Xiuxiu made a prompt decision and used Xiaolu debaters to use strange stories to justify herself and increase the exposure of her product.

Since its listing in 2016, Meitu’s market value has gone from a high of more than 80 billion to just over 8 billion today. Although Meitu Xiuxiu continues to explore more possibilities in its business, until now, Meitu has The profit model is still very unclear, and Wu Xinhong’s business future still has a long way to go.