Huang He, founder of "Make a Friend": Luo Yonghao's signing fee is still under discussion

Wen | Wei Yining, author of the weekly magazine "Finance and Economics"

Editor| Song Han

On September 23, 2020, Luo Yonghao said at the finals of the "Talk Show Conference" that the 600 million debts he owed in 2018 had been repaid nearly 400 million, and the rest was expected to be repaid within a year.

Luo Yonghao's estimate was still too optimistic. In fact, he did not pay off the debt within a year, and after about a year, "True Return" was nearing the end, and Luo Yonghao also decided to cooperate with him to engage in the "make a friend" split of live broadcasting and return to the high-tech field to start a business.

On April 8, 2022, Huang He, founder of "Make a Friend" Technology, was interviewed by 36Kr and responded to the separation of Luo Yonghao and "Making a Friend". Huang He said that Luo Yonghao did not completely leave "making a friend", but slowly faded out to do AR (augmented reality technology) entrepreneurial projects.

Luo Yonghao will transfer the operation right of the Douyin account to "make a friend", at the same time, Luo Yonghao will start broadcasting with a fixed live broadcast frequency, and the specific live broadcast plan and signing fee are still under discussion.

The live debut was a success

On April 1, 2020, April Fool's Day, Luo Yonghao opened his live debut on his Douyin personal account. The first live broadcast of goods, including household products, technology products, food and beverages, etc., although the first live broadcast is not very skilled, but with the huge popularity accumulated over a long period of time, it has achieved a cumulative number of viewers of 48 million people and a GMV of more than 110 million.

This day was jointly selected by him and Huang He, Zhu Xiaomu and other people under Hammer Technology, hammer technology will do various activities on April Fool's Day every year.

After the failure of Hammer Technology, Luo Yonghao and several other executives switched to e-cigarettes, but with the new regulations prohibiting the online promotion and sale of e-cigarettes in November 2019, coupled with the impact of the epidemic on offline e-cigarettes, the e-cigarette brands they joined such as Ono and Fulu have been impacted, so Luo Yonghao and Huang He, Zhu Xiaomu and others are ready to enter the field of live streaming.

Their original idea was to create a live streaming platform with goods, but they soon found that there was not much advantage in doing the platform, and using Luo Yonghao's popularity and traffic to make Luo Yonghao a star was the best way out.

Luo Yonghao's live streaming is operated through "make a friend", and its parent company is Chengdu Starry Sky Wild Hope Technology Co., Ltd., which was established in April 2020 and the legal representative is Huang He.

The original office location of the live broadcast room was the office where e-cigarettes were made before, and almost everyone on this team had a project that had just failed or stagnated. Their slogan is "Don't make money, make a friend", Luo Yonghao calls each cooperative brand "friend", and each cooperative brand will design a poster containing the brand name, products and Luo Yonghao's personal image, plus the slogan of "make a friend".

The slogan of "don't make money, make a friend" has a bit of a "Versailles" flavor: although Luo Yonghao's sales and order volume have declined in three months, with the improvement of the picture, the optimization of the explanation process and other adjustments, in August of that year, the data quickly achieved a recovery, Suning Tesco special sales set a new record of 4 hours of sales exceeding 200 million.

More and more brands began to "make friends" with Luo Yonghao, and at the same time, by participating in Li's "Talk Show Conference", Luo Yonghao began to gain female fans, and the number and proportion of female fans in the live broadcast room began to increase, breaking the previous stereotype of "straight men".

"Rollover" keeps coming

At the beginning of 2022, the "Make a Friend" live broadcast room released 2021 data, the team's annual number of days of broadcasting reached 325 days, the actual number of transaction orders exceeded 29.32 million, and the number of fans in the live broadcast room reached 21.31 million. In 2021, "Make a Friend" ranked first in the annual sales of Douyin, and Luo Yonghao and "Make a Friend" became a benchmark in the live broadcasting industry.

But eye-catching data does not hide the problems that have occurred in "making a friend".

On May 20, 2020, Luo Yonghao live streamed flowers with goods, many netizens received the goods, found that the roses were not fresh enough, have begun to wither, rotten, there is no way to send people, Luo Yonghao quickly announced the compensation plan, that night all the users who booked roses doubled back, a total of more than 1 million yuan compensation.

On November 28 of the same year, Luo Yonghao sold pier cardin cardigans in the live broadcast room, the wool sweater with a price of 688 yuan, but only 79.9 yuan in the live broadcast room. Subsequently, several consumers suspected that the clothes were not pure wool, and "make a friend" recycled the woolen sweaters from several consumers and sent them to the agency for professional testing, and got a reply on December 15 that the products sent for inspection were non-wool products.

"Make a friend" explained that counterfeit products and Pierre Cardin brand side has no relationship, the team supply from the channel provider Chengdu Taolibo Network Technology Company, and taoli broadcasting suppliers are Shanghai Yuanxun Technology Co., Ltd. and Tongxiang Tengyun E-commerce Co., Ltd., these two suppliers are suspected of forging fake and shoddy products, deliberate fraud, the goods and samples sent to consumers are inconsistent, Luo Yonghao's team and Chengdu Taolibo Company reported the case together.

Due to the long period of rights protection, Luo Yonghao decided to pay 3 times the compensation to consumers out of his own pocket. In May of the following year, Luo Yonghao announced the follow-up to the incident on Weibo, saying that "the heads of the two companies involved in the case have been arrested."

Although Luo Yonghao's generous compensation makes him "the more ruthless the overturning, the more stable the people are", many consumers jokingly call the fake and shoddy products bought by Luo Yonghao's live broadcast room "wealth management products", but the mistake is a mistake after all, once the live streaming goods are overturned due to quality problems, the anchor company has only two ways: one is to provide consumer satisfaction compensation, pay economic costs, and save reputation; the other is to passively cope with consumer rights protection, resulting in a decline in reputation. What Luo Yonghao and "make a friend" did was to choose the less negative one between the two kinds of losses.

Luo Yonghao had long been preparing to leave

Although Luo Yonghao has achieved great success in the field of live streaming with goods, he has long been interested.

For Luo Yonghao, who has repeatedly failed to start a business and is known as the "industry lamp", live streaming with goods is one of the few successful businesses he has done, but he has said more than once that carrying goods is not his career pursuit, and he will eventually return to the high-tech field to continue to start a business.

In fact, from the beginning of the establishment of "Make a Friend", Luo Yonghao was preparing to leave.

In late 2020 and early 2021, when Luo Yonghao was most in need of making money to pay off his debts, he appeared in the live broadcast room with a very high frequency, maintaining a dozen times a month, accounting for more than one-half of the total number of live broadcasts, and sometimes even reaching two-thirds. But as the urgency of paying off his debts has waned, Mr. Luo's interest in live streaming has become less and less, and he has begun to think about his next venture and how to make "make a friend" work as usual after he fades out.

Starting from 2021, make a friend begin to appear a large number of new anchors, the new anchors have Qi Wei, Li Shi and other stars, there are also external signings and internal incubation of anchors, although the sales of new people have declined after entering, but the unit price of customers has increased, and sales are generally stable. With the growth of newcomers, Luo Yonghao is also becoming more and more "lazy" in live broadcasting, and by 2022, Luo Yonghao's personal live broadcast time will be reduced to 3%, and the time to participate in the selection of products is also decreasing.

In the spring of 2022, the news that Luo Yonghao is about to leave "make a friend" has received widespread media attention, and it is reported that Luo Yonghao will pay off his debts in April and will continue to cooperate with a friend in the form of a contract, the signing fee is about 100 million yuan, and said that Luo Yonghao's personal live broadcast sales GMV reached 30% of the total GMV of making a friend.

For these news, Luo Yonghao publicly issued a response to deny, he also said that his signing fee is higher than 100 million yuan, he is "also the old four of the four kings of China's live broadcasting", and said that the Douyin account is planning to transfer the operation right to "make a friend", rather than a gift, in case the project fails again or even in debt, he will come back to live broadcast.

Regarding the proportion of GMV in "making a friend", Luo Yonghao said that it is less than 20% of the company's total GMV. At the end, Luo Yonghao added a statement that if the debt is paid off, he will announce it as soon as possible.

In the latest interview, Huang He, the founder of "Make a Friend", revealed that Luo Yonghao's departure will not have much impact on "making a friend", because "making a friend from the first day, I want to do a company that can be systematized, rather than completely relying on individual Internet celebrity studios." ”

At present, the team size of making friends has grown to more than 1,000 people, and has explored a relatively stable business model, no longer need to rely on the traffic brought by Luo Yonghao's personal IP. In September 2021, Luo Yonghao and Huang He went to Fujian to inspect the supply chain of their own brands, but they did not expect the outbreak of the epidemic in Fujian, Luo Yonghao was unexpectedly isolated, unable to broadcast live, and could only be played by other anchors. But Huang He said in an interview that the sales data of the live broadcast room has not declined.

Make a friend to achieve "leave Luo Yonghao and turn around", after Luo Yonghao left, he will still return to the live broadcast room as a signed artist to continue to "make friends". It's just that the VR and metaverse that Luo Yonghao wants to engage in can still be successful, and there are still great variables.

This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.