Turn on the "24-hour check-in" function, I saw a "dad" word floating on the map above the head of a male user, can't help but marvel at how close people have been?
Author | Li Mengyuan
The ingenious combination of "campus + social + cp" gave birth to an exclusive college students' love dating application - "summer", and quietly spread among college students, claiming that non-"211, 985" can not be registered, and need to choose a photo upload on campus card, student ID card and graduation certificate to verify the real identity.
But in fact, this threshold for discussion and attention has long ceased to exist on summer, and now summer is more like a new generation of social software cloaked in campus, answering questions before greeting, there is information flow, there are anonymous areas, and you can also make friends according to your interests and hobbies, and its advantage is that it has real school information.
As a long-graduated experiencer, I never felt a sense of communication or dependence during the week I tried this product. Summer wasn't attractive enough to me, and I wasn't actually in its core target user base. It may be that I have long been detached from the dependence on the campus, or maybe in the era of mobile Internet, I am more and more accustomed to the self-hi-hi between virtual people, and I have lost my feelings about reality.
It is understood that "summer" is an application under Beijing Summer Love Technology Co., Ltd., created by a group of post-90s Peking University and Tsinghua student entrepreneurship teams, and officially promoted in September 2017 in the "Qingbei" two schools, with nearly 8,000 registered users within two months.
At the same time, Summer also quickly won the favor of the capital market. According to Tianyan, after summer received an angel round of investment from Challenger Capital at the end of 2017, in November 2018, it once again obtained a series A financing from "ByteDance", with a post-investment valuation of hundreds of millions of yuan.
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Summer's positioning is a campus social app that is heartfelt, exclusive to college students, and helps college students fall in love and make friends, and the three characteristics of the corresponding landing products are: real-name authentication, answer test and anonymous area.
In order to ensure the authenticity of users, uploading student ID cards, campus cards and other information, and passing "real-name authentication + manual review" is the first task after entering the software. For graduates, summer offers a way to upload their diplomas for review.
But passing the identity review is only the beginning, and another premise for starting social networking is the "quiz test".
"There are many social software for strangers, how can summer campus be distinguished from other social software that walks the kidney?" This is one of the questions that founder Wang Rongshan is often asked. For "summer" and "campus love", the first problem is how to solve the heart. In this regard, the solution handed over by Summer is the examination mechanism.
Each user in summer can set up a set of personalized questions, if you want to open a conversation, you must first answer each other's questions, submit the test paper and get the other party's paper to pass, the two sides can become friends free dialogue. Random matching of users is also done in the form of questions, which can be answered by selecting questions of interest by dashing left and right, and behind each set of questions is a user.
In fact, doing social applications based on "spiritual communication" is not a new story, and the "soul" that focuses on the soul social route also has similar matching capabilities. The difference between summer and summer is that it not only provides a mutually acceptable rule, but also increases the likelihood of running through the lbs positioning function.
In addition to "people nearby", another way summer plays in LBS positioning is "roaming". This feature page displays the male-female ratio of each school, supports user screening for a school, and forms a list arranged by distance. This function is similar to online inter-school associations, which meets the needs of accurate cross-school communication.
Of course, whether it is real-name authentication or answer exams, the ultimate purpose of summer is to help users interact and "talk about love and then graduate" . The content interaction on summer is divided into four parts: the blackboard wall can discuss some problems that resonate with real names or anonymously; the rabbit hole is similar to the "tree hole" game, which can anonymously spit and express emotions; the campus can record campus life, similar to the circle of friends; and the group function can create interest groups.
Throughout the experience, I found that the anonymous area on summer is more attractive to users, many people will not upload the 9 photos needed for the photo wall, but will often answer questions on the blackboard wall, or speak and communicate in the anonymous area. In addition to anonymous information, other content interactions are recorded in personal novelties.
At the same time, Summer's crush feature allows users to "crush" a person, and if one day, ta also has a crush on you, the two parties automatically become friends. However, this is very unlikely, and adding a crush function to a friend may be a better choice.
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While gaining the favor of capital, Summer's growth path has also encountered some challenges.
In summer's original promotional tweets, the creative team used "Qingbei" as a selling point for promotion. The first batch of open registration permissions are only for students from domestic "985" and "211" universities and well-known overseas universities such as Harvard University and National University of Singapore.
The high threshold not only creates scarcity and attracts attention, but also saves a lot of the cost of screening users. Summer has gradually opened up the registration authority for users of ordinary universities and graduated universities, but in the app store and other application download stores, its promotional copy still emphasizes: "for Peking University, Tsinghua, Harvard, Oxford and other famous schools."
This approach cannot but be reminiscent of the early days of Facebook, the originator of online social networking in the United States, which only serves Ivy League students. Later, the "Renren Network" that became popular in domestic universities also started from Peking University Tsinghua university and then expanded to more schools. However, it is important to note that times have changed and continuing the old method may be counterproductive.
Many "double non" users have left dissatisfaction and bad reviews in app store reviews. Some people say that Summer has nakedly moved academic discrimination to social software, and some people suspect that Summer has violated privacy and leaked personal information, "how to cancel the account, do not want to receive text messages again", "sell student information", "for sponsorship"...
In the view of the New Business Intelligence NBT, summer is essentially the same as "Renren". It was born in the window of social media transformation, entering the social field with mobile terminals and campuses as an incision, which has a certain appeal to the student group. However, it also needs to withstand the pressure from other social software and the increasing distraction of users.
Previously, Summer founder Wang Rongshan revealed in "500 Days with Summer" that as of September 2018, Summer had 100,000 registered users. In the "blackboard wall" similar to the square, the update frequency of user messages remains at an average of 2 to 3 per minute. According to the calculation of 24-hour uninterrupted update, online users produce a total of about 4320 messages a day.
Increasing user activity and retention is an urgent problem for the Summer team to solve. I answered questions from 8 people nearby and 6 sets of summer recommendations in one evening, and by noon the next day, only 6 people had seen my questions, 2 people and I had become friends, one of them exchanged two sentences and the other said four. This at least shows that users use summer for too short a time and are also facing pressure from WeChat.
"When users add WeChat to each other, who else will use summer?" All strangers social progress to a certain extent will become mature people social, and the final game of acquaintance social networking will most likely be WeChat or QQ, in essence, all social products are diverting Tencent's social ecology. Summer is no exception, "a lot of people are in summer chat for a few days feel compatible and then start adding WeChat." The user said.
Moreover, based on the characteristics of geographical location, it is easy to create an atmosphere of regional intimate relationship between users, but anonymous attributes + proximity to geographical location have directly led to the breeding of a large number of malicious content, such as the release of explicit information such as "about guns", which not only consumes the user's loyalty and favorability, but also is likely to become a source of trouble in the future.
Although Summer officially adopts a "zero tolerance" approach to this, due to the complexity of the language and the limitations of the startup's technical capabilities, there is still a lot of information about the "dating gun" on the platform. Turn on the "24-hour check-in" function, I saw a "dad" word floating on the map above the head of a male user, can't help but marvel at how close people have been?
For Summer, the campus may only be a stepping stone, not the key to building barriers, the precipitation of content and the construction of atmosphere are more important.
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