As a global leader in business case teaching, Guest University has been tracking the latest business practices around the world for a long time. Among them, IP survival is also an important topic for the research of guest universities.
Continuous output of high-quality content is a key indicator of whether IP can become bigger and stronger. But there are very few IPs that really have strong content power. A lot of content is either painless and doesn't impress, or it's too public a pry to be tasteless.
How to create a super IP by doing the ultimate content? Today, I will tell you a very successful case: Uncle Kai tells stories. Through the three mental methods created by "Uncle Kai", we can help you improve your content power and create a super IP.
Below, enjoy~
For "Uncle Kai's Storytelling", everyone should be familiar with it. Many parents have this APP on their mobile phones, and it is accompanying the growth of thousands of children.
Wang Kai, the founder of "Uncle Kai Storytelling", is a student of the second season of the guest party, and I have known him for many years and witnessed the development of this company. Through long-term observation and research, I summarized the three mental methods created by "Uncle Kai".
1, first slow and then fast, to achieve the flywheel effect
The flywheel effect means that in order to make the stationary flywheel spin, you need to push it repeatedly in a circle, each turn is very laborious, but the effort of each lap will not be in vain, and the flywheel will rotate faster and faster.
The development experience of "Uncle Kai's storytelling" conforms to this law.
Wang Kai has been a host on CCTV for 8 years and is also a good voice actor.
Wang Kai Founder of "Uncle Kai Storytelling" and an alumnus of the second season of the guest faction
When he started his business, he found that although there are already many children's story platforms in the audio market, there is almost no high-quality original content.
For example, at that time, the market could not find the whole book "Journey to the West" dedicated to children, and the original work was permeated with blood and politics. Wang Kai wanted to filter out these and rewrite a pure version of "Journey to the West" for the children.
This writing is three years. At the 2019 Guest University Annual Summit, Wang Kai once recalled: "When I wrote "Uncle Kai's Journey to the West", I shut myself in the mountains alone, and I felt that I had abs. When the team wrote Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the first episode was revised for eight months. ”
The "nitpicking" of content makes all the content products on the Kaishu platform, from project establishment to launch, have to go through a long period of polishing, as little as half a year or more than three years. In the early days, the team was very tough and the growth of the business was very slow.
For such a situation, one of Wang Kai's investor friends once scolded him: "The development is so slow, are you not in a hurry?" ”
It is not that there is no hurry, what Wang Kai thinks is: make a story in three years, and then sell it for ten or twenty years. He wants to use carefully crafted original content to extend the product life cycle as much as possible and form barriers to competition.
"Uncle Kai's Storytelling" was first launched on the WeChat public account, and when the number of fans was less than 100,000, the similar platforms on the market had already been killed into a sea of blood. However, in order to ensure quality, Wang Kai insists on making his own content and not a platform. He hopes that the children can listen to all of Uncle Kai's content with confidence, rather than picking their eyes out on a smorgasbord-like platform.
His cold bench did not sit in vain. The children's content launched by "Uncle Kai's Storytelling" has gradually been loved by more and more children, and one by one has become a hit. Two years later, the number of users began to explode.
For "Uncle Kay's Storytelling", the flywheel effect has already emerged. In July 2019, "Uncle Kai Storytelling" completed the C round of financing, with a financing scale of more than 50 million US dollars, providing a strong backing for creating more extreme content.
A lot of times, most people just want to do things that are 50 to 80 points difficult, and the competition will be very fierce, but if you set the goal of 120 points, you will find that no one is competing with you. Once you reach this goal, your flywheel spins up and will spin faster and faster.
2. Interact with users and create explosive products
The explosive products of "Uncle Kai's Storytelling" are also inseparable from the participation of small users.
Wang Kai founded "Uncle Kai Storytelling", which can be traced back to his telling stories to his daughter. The first batch of seed users were my daughter's kindergarten classmates.
His story is very popular, and the children stay in the WeChat group every day waiting to hear it. Later, he received complaints from parents because he spoke too vividly and the children refused to sleep.
I really don't know whether to be happy or unhappy. Wang Kai quickly came up with an idea: after telling a story, he read a poem in the back, which children could not understand, and when reading, one sentence was smaller than the other. Children hear stories and are hypnotized by poetry, and both children and adults rejoice.
Later, "hypnotic poetry" also became a feature of "Uncle Kai's Storytelling" and became very popular.
When telling stories, Wang Kai will continue to communicate with the children, paying attention to their status: Are you still confused? Is it listening with full concentration?
Wang Kai is telling stories to the children
What's more, even if he can't personally communicate with the children on the spot, Wang Kai will let the team record the videos of the children listening to the story, capture the children's state by watching the video, and then constantly adjust the story content according to these details.
In the end, "Uncle Kai's Journey to the West" generated nearly 60 million yuan in revenue within half a year of being launched.
Wang Kai believes that when doing children's content, it is necessary to constantly interact with children in order to resonate with them on the same frequency. "Uncle Kai Storytelling" will often organize offline activities, interact with children, and if there is a painting activity, he will also integrate the children's paintings into the content products. You think, such Uncle Kai, such a content product, how can children not like it?
3. Refining method to achieve large-scale production
Any excellent cultural product, only the formation of an industrialization process, can be prosperous for a long time.
After more than a hundred years of development of Hollywood movies, what are the tricks in film art, what are the enhancement points, and what are the elements that can be fired, Hollywood filmmakers can clearly understand.
The reason why those blockbusters with both box office reputations can be mass-produced at high density is also because excellent filmmakers have refined a set of methods, just like the list, listing the elements of all good movies, the rhythm and temperament that should be, and even what kind of directors and actors are used in what movies, which are also very clear.
Similarly, as a cultural product, "Uncle Kai's Storytelling" has also entered large-scale production. In this process, it is necessary to consider both refined content research and development and standardized content production.
How does Uncle Kai mass-produce content? There are two main points: one is the systematic workflow, and the other is the content creation mechanism, including: "quality control committee" and "studio".
Since the beginning of 2017, "Uncle Kai Storytelling" has gradually formed the two core content creation mechanisms of "quality control meeting" and "studio". Quality control controls the quality of the production end, and the studio is responsible for the implementation of the project.
Quality control will review content products in a VC-like manner through voting. Just like from the angel round to the A round and the B round, a content product from the establishment of the project to the launch, to go through several rounds of polishing. The elimination rate of the angel round is 60% to 70%, and the elimination rate of the A round is more than 90%, and many projects need to repeatedly attack the A round.
At the quality control meeting, only a few executives are generally present within the company, and the other judges are experts in various industries, including screenwriters, concert directors, picture book writers, children's literature writers, university professors, etc. Depending on the project, there can sometimes be more than a dozen judges.
After the realization of large-scale production, at present, the stories written by Uncle Kai himself account for only 2% of the annual output. Their method is: after summarizing the creation into a methodology and values, through the development of a mechanism to ensure that everyone on the team operates according to the standard actions, and through a rigorous evaluation meeting, all the errors are found before the product is launched.
As of May this year, the Uncle Kai platform has more than 37 million registered users, and the average daily listening time of users has reached 70 minutes. It has gone from being the original "workshop team" to a children's content company without compromise.
Well, to sum up, "Uncle Kai Storytelling" creates a super IP by doing the ultimate content, and there are three mental methods:
Thought Question: Are you willing to sink your heart into the content? In what ways can your business interact with users and create blockbuster products together?
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a message in the comments section, I will be waiting for you here. Good articles must also be shared Oh ~ Download the guest App or pay attention to the guest university WeChat public account to get the complete course.