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In the year after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Shangke went to college in the United States after high school, and then stayed in the United States to work. Once in two or three years, he felt the impact of the development of the domestic Internet every time, especially the reform of the entire e-commerce ecology.
"I've been in the U.S. for a long time, and I really feel like a frog boiled in warm water. If I hadn't returned home, I probably would have felt that the United States would be particularly good by now. "
After personally using e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, JD.com, and Xiaohongshu in China, and experiencing the convenience of one-click payment, the inherent concept began to change. "When I return to the United States, I simply feel that the United States is a 'backward' country, and all life is inconvenient." Fair enough to say.
In the United States, all brands and influencers are accustomed to building their own websites or personal pages, which has led to the increasingly fragmented and fragmented US e-commerce market. Even Amazon only accounts for 30% or 40% of the market share. "When you see something you like and want to find it online, it's often not searchable, which is a very bad experience."
As a result, Shangke, who was still doing image recognition and search algorithms in Google at that time, planted a seed of "wanting to improve the online consumer experience in the United States".
In 2019, when the time was ripe, the seed began to germinate, breaking through the ground, and Voilà was born.
Voilà is arguably the first platform in the United States to start doing e-commerce aggregation. Shangke can use the advantages of its algorithm technology to connect brands, content and fan consumers by serving tens of thousands of influencer bloggers in the United States, helping them build personal stores for free.
In order to learn from China's advanced social e-commerce experience, Shangke made a special trip back to China to learn from the experience and set up a Chinese team responsible for product research and development.
By automatically detecting what bloggers post and generating shopping links, Voilà provides an AI-driven, customizable, shopable interface. At present, around 15,000 content creators have been aggregated on Voilà, with annual sales of tens of millions of dollars.
In today's increasingly heated up worldwide, Voilà seems to have a promising future. Recently, Voilà announced the completion of tens of millions of financing, led by Innovation Factory, followed by Fosun Ruizheng Capital, and Lingbo Capital as the financial advisor.
On March 8, founder Shangke accepted an exclusive interview with Zhixiang Network. Even though it was late at night, Shangke answered my questions energetically and coherently.
"Wanted to improve the U.S. online shopping experience"
Why do you want to do Voilà in the UNITED STATES?
Shanker: The earliest idea was when I was working at Google after college. At that time, it was a bit idle, because large companies like the United States were not as rolled up as in China.
It is also because of several returns to China, experiencing the advanced and convenient domestic mobile Internet and e-commerce consumption, the United States is somewhat backward. At that time, I wanted to solve some of the bad experiences of online shopping in the United States.
When I left China, it was just after the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and China at that time was far less developed than it is today. Up to now, I have been in the United States for more than ten years, and although the number of times I have returned to China is not much, I feel more like I have returned to China every time.
One is that the development and changes in all aspects are relatively large. On the other hand, the Chinese Internet or mobile Internet really developed very rapidly after 2010, especially around 15 years.
In fact, when I first went to the United States, I thought that e-commerce in the United States was developing quite well. Not only Amazon, but also the payment and logistics services of various e-commerce websites are much better than in China. But after returning to China every two or three years, I feel that the country's Internet, mobile Internet, including e-commerce ecology, is at least a development span of the United States in 5 to 10 years, so the touch is relatively large.
So when I was at Google, I wondered why I could experience some changes in online consumption in China, but in the United States, I felt, "There is no such thing, how can I jump so many steps to buy something, or I want to buy something, I can't find it online." "These troubles make me want to change.
Specifically, what problem did Voilà solve in the first place?
Fair: The earliest is to solve the problem of product search. Because I was also doing algorithms at Google, I happened to do picture recognition and search, so the idea at that time was to write a particularly simple application, take a photo at random, and you can find this thing on the Internet where to buy, which is the prototype of early commercialization.
But the biggest bottleneck is not similar recommendation and search algorithms, but the opening up of the database.
In the United States, the biggest problem with e-commerce is fragmentation. Numerous e-commerce websites, brand official websites, and millions of independent websites today are really an increasingly decentralized state.
As the old Chinese saying goes, "If you divide for a long time, you will be united, and if you are together for a long time, you will be divided." "But the current trend of the US e-commerce market is getting more and more divided, and there is no sign of convergence at all." So as a result, I as a user want to find something that this site has and that site doesn't. Even Amazon, the market share is only 30% or 40%. Unlike in China, I can search for almost everything I want on Taobao.
How do you get these scattered "databases" together?
Shangke: Get customers through influencer bloggers, and then string together the brand, product content, and final consumer line in reverse.
There are so many brands in the United States, so many influencer bloggers, and bloggers have so many fans, but the connection between them is very weak, so we want to make a platform, by serving bloggers, and then connect these three parties.
The vast majority of these bloggers have no way to commercialize. It may also be because the U.S. economy is so good that most people just find a full-time job, the monthly salary may be about 5,000 US dollars, can fully support the family, or even a standard middle class, so many people are not 100% committed to doing it.
But on the other hand, the vast majority of these bloggers do not have good means of commercial monetization.
The most important monetization method of American influencers is to receive advertisements based on exposure. But this way Matthew effect is very strong, only the head of the bloggers have the opportunity to get the brand's advertising, the remaining millions of bloggers, they can rarely get the ads.
But in fact, the fan loyalty of European and American bloggers is very high, what you push or what you say, these fans are very important. From this point of view, we feel that the traffic value and content value of European and American internet celebrities are even higher than those of Chinese internet celebrities.
But at the time, no one wanted to use these values to make money. Just a very large piece of meat was placed there, and no one ate it.
"Americans value web pages, light apps"
When did you start doing it?
Shangke: This project only really started to be done with a team in 2019. There was indeed such an idea before, and it was only to write some simple algorithms and applications, and did not really do it in the direction of commercialization, after all, the capital reserves and courage required for entrepreneurship are still quite high.
Of course, this business model is relatively new in the United States. So when I came back to China in the second half of 2019, the idea was to learn from the scriptures. Then we also met China Acceleration SOSV, which was one of our first angel investors.
Then unfortunately, the epidemic started and I was stuck in the country for two years. But I can also say that I am very lucky, because in China, I have set up the Chinese team.
Therefore, now China is the production and research center, and the United States is the user operation and commercialization team of the localization of the market.
It is also because of the epidemic, because of the boom in China's going to sea, that we realized that the value of this thing we did was far greater than we expected in 19 years. At first, our goal was to do something in the United States that served Americans, American brands. After returning to China, coupled with the impact of the epidemic, we found that there are a lot of factories, brands, and supply chains in China that are our customers, and we can play a role in connecting China and the United States.
At that point in time in 19 years, Internet traffic began to become expensive, which is also a factor that you think is ripe for entrepreneurship?
Yes, I think a little later may be missed, a little earlier the time is not ripe, maybe the brand side will think that I am advertising on Facebook, the ROI is very high, I struggle to find the blogger to do. Many emerging brands have eaten the traffic dividend of that year.
What services do you offer bloggers?
Shangke: The first thing we offer bloggers is to help them quickly generate a profile that can take on all the branding, social channels and product links. This is particularly popular in the United States, because everyone's demand for web pages is still very heavy, you can not do app, but you can not do without a website, which is a difference between China and the United States.
In addition, it is to help bloggers quickly generate personal stores, which is also our focus, and almost 90% of our energy and resources are invested in this.
If you just put a bunch of links on your profile, the conversion rate isn't high. Fans jumping from your social media account to your profile must be wondering what products you share and where I can buy them. So we built these bloggers' profiles into personal stores.
Are the products in these personal stores your partner brands?
Shangke: From its inception in 1919 to today, we have established cooperative relations with more than 90% of the big brands, fashion brands and some affordable brands in Europe and the United States. Collaborations are based on sales commissions, and some brands will give them marketing promotions. So we have a very large library of real-time updates.
The biggest difference between bloggers and merchants is that merchants have goods without traffic, while bloggers have traffic but no goods. Therefore, based on the content released by bloggers, through automatic identification algorithms, the products exposed in these contents are matched with cooperative merchants, and a commodity library is quickly generated.
For example, if you make a video of makeup with eyebrow pencils, foundation brushes, or eyeshadow, which may not be the blogger's own co-brand, but we work with these brands, we will post these products under your post. Fans who are interested in this product can buy it directly, and the commission goes to the blogger.
For bloggers, she has no additional costs and doesn't need to talk to brands about cooperation, so this is the biggest service we provide to bloggers.
There is also an AI recommendation distribution algorithm that can help bloggers increase conversion rates. For example, some of the products that appear in the picture may be one or two, but we can identify the scenes through the algorithm, and then recommend the products based on these scenes.
At the same time, we will make similar recommendations based on fan preferences and past behaviors. Because some bloggers use some big-name products, but her fans may not be able to afford it, then we will recommend some similar, cost-effective products to fans.
Through these services, we can also access more brands and products, which is equivalent to a delivery platform.
Is Voilà both mobile and web-based?
Shangke: We tried both, but now we mainly push the web side.
Apps were one of our early attempts, and we felt that mobile was the trend and the best experience. But then it was found that a relatively big problem was that it was difficult to balance two things in the early stages, one was to serve bloggers to help bloggers maximize commercial monetization; the other was to serve users, so that consumers could find the goods they wanted to buy to the greatest extent, and even buy the most cost-effective goods. It's hard to do both at the same time.
At that time, we launched both the web side of the service blogger and the consumer-facing app, compared the data, and finally we decided to first all in on the web side. Capturing the blogger crowd in the early stages is the most critical, they are the ones who really master the traffic.
"We are not yet a little red book"
Some people compare Voilà to the American version of the Little Red Book, do you think it is accurate?
Shangke: In terms of product form, it is not yet at this stage, because we have not yet done the aggregation of bloggers. We can say that we can say that it is a tool platform for bloggers or content creators to provide e-commerce monetization services, and the interaction with users is more achieved through bloggers.
When the number of bloggers accumulates to a certain extent, we may move in the direction of aggregation.
How do you find these bloggers?
Shang Ke: Most bloggers are word of mouth, because the circle is actually relatively small and pays attention to each other. When one blogger is using our products, another blogger will see it and be curious and say, "What meat you eat, I want to try." "
In addition, we will also take the initiative to contact some quality bloggers to suggest that they try our products.
Are you one of the first batch of e-commerce aggregation in the United States, and are others doing it?
Shangke: Yes, doing aggregation is certainly the dream of countless people, because once it can be done, your business value, including the experience provided to users, is unparalleled.
But the problem is that it's very difficult to do aggregation. The E-commerce market in the United States is extremely fragmented, and it is very difficult to compete for traffic, which is why we gave up the app later.
We also did testing to see if it was feasible to make aggregations directly, and found that traffic acquisition was very difficult. So we will save the country in a curve, first do decentralization, and see if we can slowly walk back to the road of centralization.
What are the difficulties?
Shangke: The difficulty is to get customers, if you directly advertise yourself as a centralized platform, you need all users, bloggers, jump to you, this customer acquisition cost is too high. It's much easier to reach users through service bloggers.
Who is responsible for your team in China?
Shang Ke: The two partners of our domestic team, one is out of byte, and the other is from Ali. Ali's previous Taobao search recommended piece, "Guess you like" section is what he did. Byte that is the top 100 employee of the headlines, making headline recommendations. So one is the technical CTO, and the other is responsible for the product.
Team building is really not easy, and I now think it's harder to build a team than to raise money. Although financing is to manage others to ask for money, I got the money and wanted to spend it, and it was really not easy to recruit the right people. Finding the right people and then willing to join early-stage startups is an overseas market, which is really difficult, so it's a lot of white in this area.
What's next for entering the Chinese market?
Shangke: Now our users are actually European and American users, and we hope to build such a platform to help more Chinese brands go global and do another export for Chinese brands to go overseas.